Kellyhispersonalconstructtheory.pdf

G ABRIELE C HIARI

George A. Kelly

and His Personal Construct Theory P UBLISHED

UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE

G EORGE K ELLY S OCIETY , 2017

George A. Kelly and His Personal Construct Theory

©2017 Gabriele Chiari Under the auspices of the George Kelly Society

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Dedication

To Don, Maria Laura, Miller, and Trevor, four special shipmates on my journey.

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Foreword

I thoroughly enjoyed writing this e-book on the life and the work of George A. Kelly. The task combined my lifelong interest in personal construct theory and psychotherapy together with my amateur passion for historical research and desktop publishing. I came up with the idea while trying to give a photographic evidence to my mental picture of the early years of Kelly’s life: the adventurous life of his maternal grandfather, the parents’ migration to the West, the farm in the desolate Kansas where he was born, the colleges he attended. But appetite comes with eating, and so I kept on sifting through universities’ yearbooks and archives for unpublished images and further information about Kelly’s academic career. Internet makes all that possible while sitting at a desk nowadays. I like the final result. It gives, I think, a fresh image of George Kelly the man, and helps to appreciate his work in the context of the psychology of his times. I hope you too like it.

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Acknowledgment

Sources

The e-book is published under the auspices of the George Kelly Society.

In order not to weigh the text down, many references are abbreviated following the example of: [K1955:8-10] (Kelly, 1955, pp. 8-10). Here is the list of the abbreviations and the corresponding references.

The chapter on the life of George A. Kelly is based mainly on the biography written by Fay Fransella, George Kelly, London, Sage, 1995. I also consulted the e-book in Kindle format written by The Gale Group, A Study Guide for George Alexander Kelly, in the Series “Psychologists and Their Theories for Students”, Farmington Hills, MI, Gale, 2015. Many of the pictures, as well as a lot of information about places, people and history, are taken from the web, particularly from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Unless differently specified, the pictures are in the public domain. I would like to thank Jörn Scheer, who pointed out some errors in the draft, and gave me permission to publish his pictures of the houses where Kelly had lived at Worthington, OH, and the picture of the Kellys’ grave. My thanks also go to Peter Cummins and Harry Procter for their extensive proofreading, and to Franz Epting for his detailed precious conribution to Kelly’s biography. A special thank goes to Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge who generously provided me with five unpublished pictures of her father and his family and with personal information about the period in which they were taken.

[B1979] Bannister, D. (1979). Personal communication. In Neimeyer R. A. (1985), The development of personal construct psychology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. [BJ2008] Benjafield, J. G. (2008). George Kelly: Cognitive psychologist, humanistic psychologist, or something else entirely? History of Psychology, 11, 239-262. [BT2008] Butt, T. (2008). George Kelly: The psychology of personal constructs. Houndmills, UK, Palgrave Macmillan. [E2016] Epting, F. R. (2016). George Kelly: A revealing moment. In D. A. Winter & N. Reed (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of personal construct psychology (pp. 24-33). London: Wiley. [F1995] Fransella, F. (1995). George Kelly. London: Sage. [K1955] Kelly, G. A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs (Vols. 2). New York: Norton. [K1960] Kelly, G. A. (1960). Confusion and the clock. Ohio State University. Published in F. Fransella (Ed.), Personal construct psychology 1977 (pp. 209-232). London: Academic Press, 1978. [K1963] Kelly, G. A. (1963). The autobiography of a theory. In B. A. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 46-65). New York: Wiley, 1969. [K1965] Kelly, G. A. (1965). The psychotherapeutic relationship. In B. A. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 216-223), New York: Wiley, 1969. [L2011] Landfield. A. (2011). Going to Ohio State and to George A. Kelly. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 8, 11-16. [N1985] Neimeyer, R. A. (1985). The development of personal construct psychology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. [NJ1997] Neimeyer, R. A., & Jackson, T. T. (1997). George A. Kelly and the development of personal construct theory. In W. G. Bringmann, H. E. Lück, R. Miller & C. E. Early (Eds.), A pictorial history of psychology (pp. 364-372). Chicago: Quintessence. [S1977] Sechrest, L. (1977). Personal construct theory. In R. J. Corsini (Ed.), Current personality theories (pp. 203-242). Itasca, IL: Peacock. [SB1991] Stewart, A. E., & Barry, J. R. (1991). Origins of George Kelly's constructivism in the work of Korzybski and Moreno. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 4, 121-136. [SB1979] Stringer, P., & Bannister, D. (1979). Introduction. In P. Stringer & D. Bannister (Eds.), Constructs of sociality and individuality (pp. xiii-xvii). London: Academic Press. [ZJ1983] Zelhart, P., & Jackson, T. T. (1983). George A. Kelly, 1931-1943: Environmental influences on a developing theorist. In J. R. Adams-Webber & J. C. Mancuso (Eds.), Applications of personal construct theory (pp. 137-154). Toronto: Academic Press.

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C HAPTER 1

George A. Kelly, the person

Personal Construct Theory (PCT) – a theory of personality with particular application to psychotherapy – has been elaborated around the middle of the XXth century by a man born near Perth, Kansas: George Alexander Kelly (April 28, 1905 - March 6, 1967). This book is a tribute to his person and his work.

A portrait of George A. Kelly taken while he was in the midst of teaching one of his seminars (information provided by Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge).
 From Maher, 1969, Ralph Norman photographer.

S ECTION 1

Early life of George A. Kelly

What better than to let Kelly himself narrate the story of his infancy and childhood? I was born in a farm near Perth, Kansas, on April 28 1905, the only child of Theodore Vincent Kelly and Elfleda Merriam Kelly. My father had been educated for the Presbyterian ministry at Parsons College and at McCormick and Princeton Seminaries. My mother had been born on Barbados in the British West Indies where her fa-

Pioneers moving to the far west.

ther had taken his family after steam had driven his sailing ship out of the North AtThe autobiographical sketches in this section are lantic trade. Later Captain Merriam had taken from Fay Fransella’s George Kelly (Sage, become an Indian agent in South Dakota 1995). and it was at the border town of Brown’s Valley, Minnesota that my parents had met. Not long after their marriage the career in the ministry was abandoned and the young couple moved to the farm where I was born. [F1995:5]

The above sketches are sufficient for imagining a piece of the history of American pioneers; and Kelly’s pioneering background pervades all his theory. As Miller Mair writes: You can almost hear the “wagons trains rolling westward,” seeking new pastures and more space for living, as you read Kelly’s writings. [cited in N1985:11]

Theodore Kelly had studied at the first and most famous centers of Presbyterian education in the USA. Parsons College is a now defunct private liberal arts college l o c a t e d i n Fa i r fie l d , I o w a . Founded in 1875 with 34 students, the teachers were three Presbyterian ministers. McCormick Theological Seminary was born in a log cabin in Indiana in 1829 View of Parsons College ca. 1890 in Fairfield, Iowa. with a handful of students, and relocated to Chicago at the beginning of the Civil War. The Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in New Jersey in 1812 and very quickly became one of the largest seminaries associated with the Presbyterian Church. Kelly tells that after his marriage Theodore abandoned his career as a minister and moved to the farm in Kansas where George was born: a terrible leap from the solemn halls of prestigious colleges and churches to the dusty and desolate prairies of the American midwest.

The McCormick Theological Seminary, North Halsted St., Chicago.

When George was four years old his father explored a new adventure. In 1909 my father converted our lumber wagon into a covered wagon and moved the family to Eastern Colorado to take up a claim on some of the last free land offered settlers in the west. The venture failed because no water could be found under the land, and my parents moved back to the farm in Kansas. [F1995:5-6]

Another important adult in George’s world was probably his maternal grandfather, a Nova Scotian captain on a sailing ship who was driven off the North Atlantic Trade routes upon the arrival of steamships. On one trip Captain Merriam took his family with him on a multi port trading trip. After they left Rio de Janeiro sailing north, they passed by the beautiful island of Barbados and Kelly’s grandmother convinced her husband to stop there for two weeks. During this time, Kelly’s mother was born. Later, we find Captain Merriam living at Browns Valley,

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Minnesota, serving as an Indian agent in South Dakota (Indian agents were individuals authorized to interact with Indian tribes on behalf of the U.S. government). Browns Valley was settled in 1867 just at the border with South Dakota, and was inhabited by a few dozen people. In his case, a leap from the boundless ocean A sailing ship powered by steam in the 1800s.

to the confined Indian reservations. No surprise if in his paper “Confusion and the Clock”, written shortly after he had had a heart attack, George Kelly writes:

Broadway St., Browns Valley Minnesota, 1909.
 Lakenswoods.com Postcard Collection

The town of Perth located in south central Sumner County was a shipping point for livestock on the Rock Island Railroad. In such a land the distances between farms, ranches and shops were of many miles, and there was no way to attend a school. “Fortunately Kelly’s father had brought an extensive library of books with him to the farm, and Jackie [Kelly’s daughter] remembers her father saying that the greatest gift his father ever gave him was his library” [E2016:27].

And I thought of our first grandchild, expected in a few weeks, whom I might never see, and to whom I might never tell the wonderful stories that all grandchildren should hear. [K1960]

Let us now come back to Perth, an incorporated community in Sumner County, “The Wheat Capital of the World”, whose county seat is Wellington. On Google Maps you cannot locate Perth; you can hardly find S. Perth Rd, going from the border with Oklahoma to

and I was in the middle of this vast kind of billiard table. And I passed a cemetery that had quite a few gravestones in it, so there must have been something there at some time, but it had long gone. There was a farm in the distance, and I passed about four more en route. But in England we just never see that amount of space with nothing much in it... Somebody had been telling me about Sartre, and they were telling me he grew up in Paris, and he looked out over the vast view of roofs, and houses, and tenements, and people crowded in piles. And I did suddenly get a sense of contrast, that, stuck out there on a farm in Kansas, if you didn’t imagine something, then there wouldn’t be much there. You’d have to make something out of it... [Kelly] grew up on the kind of Kansas farm where you invent everything you need. And he carried that over. [B1979:11]

Kelly tells: Map of the Island of Barbadoes, for the History of the West Indies by Bryan Edwards (1794).

My schooling was rather irregular and in Colorado was limited to the occasions when my parents could spend a few weeks in town. However, since they themselves were educated, they took seriously their responsibility for my studies at home. [F1995:6].

the west of Wellington Lake. Don Bannister, the British psychologist who together with Fay Fransella contributed to the spreading of personal construct theor y in Europe, describes his attempt to visit Perth in the following way.

Indian chiefs and US officials.

I took a 200-mile detour to visit Perth, Kansas, and I’m not actually sure I visited it. Because the signpost said, “Perth 7 miles”. So I set the odometer on the car

The Princeton Seminary in the 1800s.

The situation was not very different when George reached the age for attending a high school. “He even put together the chassis of an old car in order to drive to a nearby school. When the vehicle proved unreliable, he convinced his family to let him leave home in 1918 at age 13 and move to the ‘big city’ of Wichita, Kansas, to live with his uncle’s family” [E2016:27].

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The Friends University is a Christian University of Quaker heritage, donated in 1898 to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Quaker settlements began to appear in the Great Plains in Kansas in the 1850s when families moved together from Quaker communities in Indiana and Iowa. Lured by the prospect of choice land, they were also motivated by benevolent concern for Native Americans and the oppor-

The Friends University, Wichita.
 Source: www.epodunk.com

G ALLERY 1.1 Old images of Sumner County, Kansas

A map dated 1902 showing 4 of the 30 townships of Sumner County, Kansas. Perth is in the township of Downs, quadrant down left.
 From http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kssumntp/township.htm My high school education was about as badly mixed up as my elentary schooling had been. After a few weeks commuting to a local high school it was decided to send me to Wichita. Thus it was that I lived away from home most of the time after I was thirteen, and I attended four different high schools. [F1995:6]

In 1920 Wichita had a population of 72,217, entering the top 100 largest cities in the United States thanks to the nascent aircraft industry. Kelly continues the description of his education as follows: When I was sixteen I transferred to the Friends University academy in Wichita and began taking a combination of college and academy courses. Thus it was that I did not actually graduate from high school. A fact that is sometimes hard to explain. [F1995:7]

Perth, Kansas. Looking East, south side of main street from railroad tracks. Date: between 1890 and 1920. Source: www.kansasmemory.org

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G ALLERY 1.2 Old images of Wichita, Kansas

Kelly concludes: In 1926, after three years at Friends University and one at Park College, Missouri, I completed my baccalaureate studies with majors in physics and mathematics. [F1995:7]

According to Fransella, Kelly’s study of physics and mathematics had a profound influence on the generation of personal construct theory.

Kansas Yearly Meeting (Quakers), Christian Endeavor Summer Conference, Friends University, Wichita, Kansas, 1922.
 Source: transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons

Wichita High School. Date: between 1900 and 1910. Source: www.kansasmemory.org

tunity of voting against slavery in this newly opened territory. While at Friends’, Kelly made his first friends and started to read John Dewey’s version of American pragmatism [E2016:27]. “It was also at Friends that he was exposed to the Quaker ideas of world peace” [E2016:28]. As evidence of this, he was awarded first prize in the Peace Oratorical Contest held there in 1924. His speech was titled “The sincere motive” and the topic was on war. During the same period he wrote a novel, “Call to arms” (1926), and two essays, “Forgotten issues” (1925) and “A plan for socializing Friends University with respect to student participation in school control” (1927). Park College, Parkville, Missouri. Source: Pinterest.

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G ALLERY 1.3 The Talisman, Yearbook of the Friends Univer-

G ALLERY 1.4 The Narva, Yearbook of Park College, MO

The team of the debate season 1924 was the greatest in the history of the school.

George Kelly in the Class of 1926 (the first bottom-left).

sity, KS

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APPENDIX 1: G ALLERY 1.1: Old images of Sumner County, Kansas Source: www.kansasmemory.org

Perth, Kansas Looking East, south side of main street from railroad tracks. The town of Perth located in south central Sumner County was a shipping point for livestock on the Rock Island Railroad.Date: Between 1890 and 1920.

Foltz home in South Haven, Kansas. Date: Between 1910 and 1920.

Perth, Kansas. View of the business district in Perth, Kansas, showing several stores and a hotel, including a drug store. The photo shows the south side of Main Street looking west. The town of Perth, located in south central Sumner County, was a shipping point for livestock on the Rock Island Railroad.Date: Between 1890 and 1920.

Cowboys gathered for a round-up at the 101 ranch south of Hunnewell, Kansas. Date: Between 1870 and 1898.

APPENDIX 2: G ALLERY 1.2: Old images of Wichita, Kansas Source: www.kansasmemory.org

View of band members (four of whom have band instruments and are facing the others who are striking anvils) playing the "Anvil Chorus" on the Morton Simmons Hardware Company float in the 1909 Flower Parade in Wichita, Kansas. Date: 1909.

Wichita High School. Date: between 1900 and 1910

This black and white photograph showing people standing on the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad depot platform at Wichita, Kansas.Date: 1910.

A photograph of Union Station at Wichita, Kansas. The station was operated by the Wichita Union Terminal Company, and it was used by the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad; St. Louis-San Francisco Railway; and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. Date: Between 1914 and 1921.

View of the Wichita Beacon Building after it opened on January 2, 1911. It was the first skyscraper in Kansas. Date: 1911.

A color postcard showing an interior view of the waiting room at the Union Station depot in Wichita, Kansas. Date: 1914

APPENDIX 3: G ALLERY 1.3: The Talisman, Yearbook of the Friends University, KS, 1924

The team of the debate season 1924 was the greatest in the history of the school.

George Kelly is the second from left.

And Kelly won also the Peace oratorical contest...

... with the oration “The Sincere Motive”. The first prize was $15.

APPENDIX 4: G ALLERY 1.4: The Narva, Yearbook of Park College, MO, 1926

George Kelly in the Class of 1926 (the first bottom-left).

George Kelly in the Class of 1926 (the second top-left).

The Schedule of Debates.

S ECTION 2

The Postgraduate Years

After his baccalaureate in physics and mathematics, George, twenty-one years old, makes a choice which directs him towards the human sciences. My plan had always been to complete an engineering course after graduating from college, but an interest and some success in intercollegiate debate aroused my interest in social issues and made me question the ultimate value of a career in engineering. The next fall therefore I enrolled in educational sociology at the University of Kansas, with minor studies in labor relations and sociology. My master’s thesis was a study of Kansas City workers’ distribution of leisure time activities. [F1995:8]

So Kelly got his MA in 1927 with a thesis titled “One thousand workers and their leisure”. But these are hard times for him, looking for a job in order to finance his studies: In the fall of 1927, with my thesis still incompleted and no offers of a teaching job, in spite of many applications, I went to Minneapolis. There I managed to survive by teaching one night a week in each of three night-schools: one for the American Bankers Association, one a speech class for labor organizers, and one an Americanization class for prospective citizens. I enrolled in the University of Minnesota in sociology and biometrics, but after several weeks it was discovered that I had been unable to pay my fees and I was told that I could no longer attend. [F1995:8] In the late winter of 1927-28 I was given a job teaching psychology and speech, including the coaching of dramatics, in the Sheldon Junior College at Sheldon, Iowa. The college, then in its second year, had had disciplinary problems and the previous teacher had been run out of town by the rowdy students. The superintendent of schools apparently decided that academic qualifications were of secondary importance and employed me. [F1995:8]

His interest in drama will have a central place in his later proposal of a personal construct psychotherapy, where role play and enactment have a major part, as well as being central in the specific method of “fixed role therapy”. In the meantime, it allowed Kelly to meet his future wife, Gladys Thompson. Gladys was born April 27, 1906, in Sioux City, Iowa, historically inhabited by Yankton Sioux. It was there that Gladys grew up and attended the Morningside College. Upon graduation in 1926, she moved to Sheldon, where she taught high school English and drama. The common passion for drama allowed them to know and love each other.

The Royal Theater, Kansas City, 1927.


Source: provided to Wikimedia Commons by the National Archives and Records Administration

Kelly’s job at the Sheldon Junior College was short lived: After a year and a half there, a summer in sociology at the University of Minnesota, and a few months as an aeronautical engineer for the struggling Watkins Aircraft Company back in Wichita, responsible for stress analysis, I went to Edinburgh on an exchange fellowship. [F1995:8]

The report to the U.S. Bureau of Aeronautics written in

Postcard view of Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa, 1910s.
 Source: Wikimedia Commons

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1929 titled “Fuselage stress analysis and design specifications for Skylark Model I”, in support of an application for a manufacturing license for the Watkins Aircraft Plant in Wichita, is evidence of Kelly’s temporary reversion to work as an engineer. Kelly received his second bachelor’s degree (this time in education) in 1930 as an exchange scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, studying for a year under Sir Godfrey Thomson, an English educational psychologist known as a critical pioneer in intelligence research. Thomson gave Kelly a statistical training. His thesis, “Prediction of teaching success”, has never been found, but its search allowed the discovery of an unknown writing of his. As Don Bannister tells, Some years after Kelly’s death an American psychologist, William Perry, devoted part of a year of world travel to a visit to Scotland to try and locate Kelly’s Edinburgh thesis. He never found the thesis but by dint of archeological shrewdness, perseverance and good fortune he found, beneath the dust piles of an Edinburgh library cellar, a paper by George Kelly clipped to a letter to Sir Godfrey Thomson asking him to draw the attention of Cyril Burt to the work. [SB1979:1]

Equally it shows that long before the publication of construct theory Kelly knew well that he, like the rest of us, was in the interpretation business and he vigorously rejected the notion that we are truly designating “realities”. [SB1979:2]

It was in Edinburgh that George and Gladys got engaged. In 1931, back in America, Kelly finally entered psychology by completing a Ph.D. on aphasia and its physiological psychological accounts, “Common factors in reading and speech disabilities”, at the State University of Iowa. After a single year of study, Kelly received the Ph.D. from the hands of Carl Seashore, Dean of the Graduate College of the University of Iowa and chairman of the Psychology Department, known for his studies in speech-language pathology and music education. Seashore had been Kelly’s mentor, even though he assigned Kelly to another

member of the faculty, Lee Edward Travis, a pioneering experimentalphysiological psychologist and speech pathologist. According to Franz Epting – who had the opportunity to study with Kelly at the Ohio State University as a graduate student – “Kelly styled his way of being a professional person on his mentor, a very dignified man with a formidable presence” [E2016:25], but also Travis had a lot to offer Kelly as he undertook his dissertation research and, according to Epting, he too had a significant role to play.

Sir Cyril Burt was also an educational psychologist, known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Unfortunately, shortly after his death his studies came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data.

Sir Godfrey H. Thomson (1881-1955).

his foreword to the paper Bannister writes:

Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971) in 1930.

The paper, “Social Inheritance”, was published in 1979 in the book Constructs of Sociality and Individuality edited by P. Stringer and D. Bannister. In

Certainly in its style the paper is unmistakably George Kelly. It exemplifies that relaxed irreverence which marked much of Kelly’s writing. Consider the statement

On June 3rd, two days after receiving his Ph.D., George Kelly and Gladys Thompson were married.

“a cultured man was one whose mental faculties were scrubbed and burnished until they reflected without the distorsion of originality all the abstractions of the day. A man so reflected is still considered by some to be a cultured man.” Carl Emil Seashore (1866-1949).

Having completed his Ph.D., Kelly registered with a placement agency in Chi-

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cago, and the agency referred him to a small, public college in the western half of his home state – Fort Hays Kansas State College. At long last he had obtained his first job as a teacher in psychology, as he himself tells:

Lee Edward Travis (1896-1987)

In the fall of 1931 we set out for Hays, Kansas to teach in the Fort Hays Kansas State College for what was to stretch out into twelve years. It was here that I found there was little occasion to pursue work in physiological psychology and I turned to the kind of psychological services that seemed to be most needed. This was clinical psychology, especially in the schools of the State. Soon we received some legislative support for a program of traveling clinics that gave my students and me a chance to develop our psychological thinking in close contact with persons in distress. [F1995:9]

So, Kelly’s early interest was for physiological psychology - a discipline that his later theory will regard as an hybrid from the epistemological standpoint of constructive alternativism. It is due to the difficult economic situation of the region in that period that Kelly saw the need to turn to clinical psychology.

George Kelly’s wedding photo, June 3, 1931, one day after his wedding and two days after he received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. By kind courtesy of Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge

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S ECTION 3

The Professional Years

Fort Hays first classroom.

T HE Y EARS

AT

F ORT H AYS K ANSAS S TATE C OLLEGE

Fort Hays, in Western Kansas, had been a frontier military outpost that was closed in 1889. A well documented essay about the environmental influences on Kelly’s ideas reports: The public knows Kansas as that flat, treeless country of wheat farms that served as Dorothy’s point of departure for her trip to Oz. Western Kansas is like that. It is a huge, sparsely populated area – it is now, and it was in the 1930s. The city of Hays had 4770 residents in 1931. [...] Fort Hays State University was and is the only public institution of higher education in an area that is 250 miles east to west and 225 miles north to south. Fort Hays State was and is a geographically isolated educational institution with the expressed mission of serving the people of that large geographic region. [...] George Kelly did a great deal to h e l p e s t a b l i s h t h e ex p e c t a t i o n . [ZJ1983:139]

Picken Hall, the oldest building on the Fort Hays State College campus, early 1900s.

As to the College, it had just taken its name in 1931, being formerly the Western State Normal School since 1902, and the Kansas State Teachers College of Hays since 1923. It will be elevated to University status only in 1977.

In 1931, the school was only 29 years old, and although liberal arts curricula and degrees were first offered in 1933, the college was, and would continue for many years to be, a “teachers’ college.” The graduate program in psychology, along with several others, had been established in 1929. With the addition of Kelly, the Department of Psychology had three faculty members. Homer Blosser Reed was chairman. [...] We can find no evidence that Reed contributed to Kelly’s clinical activities, research, or theory. On the contrary, their relationship appears not to have been either personally or professionally close. [ZJ1983:137-138]

We have a detailed description of Kelly’s work in the first years at Fort Hays: Shortly after his arrival at Fort Hays State University, Kelly appears to have staked out the clinical area of the department as his own. [...] Kelly’s clinical training program and clinics grew out of a class project begun in an adolescent psychology course that was taught in the fall of 1931. The class project involved examination of an exceptional child who was enrolled in the college grade school. This experience led to the opening of the psychology clinic, which was free and open to anyone who required diagnostic, therapeutic, or assessment services. By the spring of 1934, the clinic had served 167 clients. Of those clients, 50 had received therapy; 67 had received diagnostic services, and 50 had received educational testing services. [ZJ1983:140]

The therapeutic orientation of the clinic, according to a description in Kelly’s unpublished manuscript Handbook of Clinic Practice written in 1936, included four types of methods: direct (remedial academic training, motor training, and speech therapy), diversional (systematization of the patient’s daily program, diversion of thought to noncathartic ideas, and occupational therapy), suggestive (reassurance and countersuggestion), and cathartic (activity therapy, pure catharsis, psychoanalysis, and child psychoanalysis). In the fall of 1933 Kelly began his traveling clinics. Butt de-

The 1940 movie directed by John Ford based on John Steinbeck’s drama published in 1939.

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scribes the experience as follows: His work entailed providing a psychological service for the schools in western Kansas. This was a huge area that he covered in a travelling clinic, along with his few students. These were pioneering days in psychology, and Kelly was used to the pioneering attitude - his own family had been one of the last to move west in a covered wagon. Guidelines and job descriptions were not prescribed like they are today. His work developed into what he later described as the ‘heart-breaking tasks of the psychotherapist’ with both children and adults. Heartbreaking it would surely have been. The USA was in the grip of the Great Depression that had followed the collapse of the stock markets in 1929. Kansas itself was soon to became what was to be called a ‘dustbowl’. Intensive farming and the changes in the landscape it involved resulted in the winds tearing away the topsoil in which crops grew. The droughts of the early 1930s exacerbated the situation. The agriculture on which the local economy was based collapsed. There were no health or social security safety nets. Starvation and poverty were everywhere. This was the background for Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath drama. [BT2008:7-8]

But what kind of psychotherapy had Kelly to offer to his wretched clients? We know from his “The autobiography of a theory” what had been his feelings when he first met the two main theoretical alternatives in the psychology of the 1930s: behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Clark L. Hull (1884-1952), the behaviourist psychologist most quoted by Kelly.

In the first course in psychology that I took I sat in the back row of a very large class, tilted my chair against the wall, made myself as comfortable as possible, and kept one ear cocked for anything interesting that might turn up. One day the professor, a very nice person who seemed to be trying hard to convince himself that psychology was something to be taken seriously, turned to the blackboard and wrote an “S,” an arrow, and an “R.” Thereupon I straightened up my chair and listened, thinking to myself that now, after two or three weeks of preliminaries, we might be getting to the meat of the matter. Although I listened intently for several sessions after that the most I could made of it was that the “s” was what you had to have in order to account for the “R” and the “R” was put there so the “S” would have something to account for. I never did find out what that arrow stood for – not to this day – and I have pretty well given up trying to figure it out. I can see, of course, that once you step into this solipsism you can go round and round without feeling obligated to come out with anything useful. [K1963:46-47]

On the other hand, Kelly’s encounter with psychoanalysis was not much more satisfying: About three years later, after I had abandoned engineering as a career and had entered graduate school in an effort to learn something about sociology and labor relations, I decided it was high time I had a look at Freud. I can remember the occasion rather well. I was in the northeast corner of the reading room of the library at the University of Kansas. I don’t remember which one of Freud’s books I was trying to read, but I do remember the mounting feeling of incredulity that anyone could write such nonsense, much less publish it. It was not the pan-sexualism that makes Freud objectionable to some new readers, but the elastic meanings and arbitrary syntax that disturbed me. If I had any misgivings about having abandoned psychology so readily after my first encounters, I had very few regrets after reading Freud that day. [K1963:47]

Some years later Kelly caricatured the two approaches as “push and pull theoSigmund Freud (1856-1939) ries of motivation”. They share the belief that the person is determined by some force or another: pushed by deep forces according to psychoanalysis, pulled by this or that force in the environment in behaviourism. In contrast to both, Kelly claimed that personal construct theory “was about the jackass in the middle”. Anyway, while trying to imagine a way to give help to his clients, Kelly went back to Freud for a second look. My recollections of Rasmussen’s Principal Nervous Pathways and of Thorndike’s electrical condenser theory of learning applied at the synapses had not proved very helpful to people troubled about what was to become of them. But now that I had listened to the language of distress, Freud’s writings made a new kind of sense. That fellow Freud, he was indeed a clinician! He too must have listened to these same cries echoing from deep down where there are no sentences, no words, and no syntax. So it was that I became a “Freudian,” if not by training, at least by persuasion. [K1963:50-51]

So, a sort of “wild psychoanalysis” was the main therapeutic tool in the clinical activities carried out by Kelly and his students at least until the late 1930s.

11

The traveling clinics were designed for the diagnosis and the resolution of the problems of school children.

G ALLERY 1.5 Forsyth Library Archives and Special Collections, Fort Hays State University

In retrospect these clinics were marvels of organization and must have taken considerable boldness and endurance. A typical schedule for a traveling clinic involved leaving Hays by automobile at 3:00 A. M. in order to be on site 100 miles away by 8:00 A. M. The staff consisted of Kelly and three to five undergraduates and/ or master’s candidates who Forsyth Library I and the Science Hall from the columns of were designated to take the Picken Hall, 1930s. roles of nurse, social worker, Copyright University Archives, Fort Hays State University psychometrist, etc. Up to 12 cases were seen in a day. For each case, Kelly would designate a set of evaluation measures to be administered by his students. While these tests were being administered, Kelly would give a public lecture followed by a question and answer period. The content and purpose of these lectures is not yet fully known. After lunch, case conferences were held until early evening. After dinner, recommendations for remediation were given to parents and teachers. These recommendations were specific, “practical” suggestions to be carried out in the child’s environment by his or her caregivers. A unique feature of the clinics was a 2-year follow-up by mail. [ZJ1983:143-144]

Before students were selected, they had to be psychology majors who had made a commitment to get a Ph.D., and they were required to enter therapy with Kelly for just a few sessions up to a semester. Knowledge of psychometric measures (Stanford-Binet Intelligence test in primis) was emphasized, The Old Rarick Hall at Fort Hays Kansas as well as the reading of about 20 State College, home of Kelly’s efforts to probooks of psychiatry (among them, vide family and school consultation. Henderson and Gillespie’s Textbook of Psychiatry) and psychology (such as Adler’s The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, Fenichel’s Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis, and Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis). But the basic

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1932. 1 of 12

12

teaching document in the clinical program was the Handbook of Clinic Practice – referred to by the students as “The Bible” – written by Kelly in 1936 and continually revised. The book included “the Rules” for professional conducts, a statement of professional ethics, a definition of psychology in relation to other helping professions, and detailed procedures to be used in The house that Kelly himself physithe traveling clinic, as well as forms to be filled cally built for his family in 1939. From out in each activity area. The set of ethical http://www.centrepcp.co.uk/georgekel ly.htm statements are said to be very similar to those currently adopted by the American Psychological Association. In the preface to The Psychology of Personal Constructs Kelly acknowledges that his “book started as a handbook of clinical procedures. It was designed for the writer’s students and used as a guide in the clinic of which he was the director” [K1955:ix]. But Kelly soon began to be uncomfortable with psychoanalysis: It was not that they were failing me so much as it was that I felt myself beginning to take them for granted. And ideas, like women, when too long taken for granted are likely to turn fickle. So I began fabricating “insights.” I deliberately offered “preposterous interpretations” to my clients. Some of them were about as unFreudian as I could make them-first proposed somewhat cautiously, of course, and then, as I began to see what was happening, more boldly. My only criteria were that the explanation account for the crucial facts as the client saw them and that it carry implications for approaching the future in a different way. [K1963:52]

Here is the germ of the theory he developed in the following years. Apart from the handbook written in 1936 regarded by Kelly himself as the embryo of personal construct theory, his twelve years stay left their mark on Fort Hays Kansas State College.

The history of the “Kelly Center” at FHSU.


From https://www.fhsu.edu/kellycenter/Kelly-Center-Name-History/


By 1936 more than 20 clinics a year were being held, and a satellite system of four or five “permanent” branch clinics throughout Kansas was established in the period 19361937. In the first 20 years of the graduate program

in psychology at Fort Hays, 21 master’s degrees were awarded. Of those, Kelly supervised 15. Two of them (Edwards, 1943; Robinson, 1940) concern the development of a new technique, role therapy, which will be developed later as fixed-role therapy. The last picture of Kelly at FHKSC.
 From Reveille 1943.

13

Finally, as evidence of the fact that Kelly left his mark, Fort Hays State University is still offering a “Support Services for Students, Faculty and Staff” named Kelly Center, heir of the Psychological Service Center founded by Kelly in 1932.

P ICTURES THE

OF

Y EARBOOK

G EORGE A. K ELLY

OF

FROM

R EVEILLE ,

F ORT H AYS K ANSAS S TATE C OLLEGE

Kelly remained at Fort Hays Kansas State College until 1943, when he joined the Navy during World War II.

Reveille 1935. An experiment with a rat maze conducted with H. B. Reed.

Reveille 1932, 1933, 1934

Reveille 1938

Reveille 1936, 1939, 1940

Reveille 1942

Reveille 1937. Delta Epsilon, the honorary fraternity for the purpose of recognizing outstandiing achievements in the field of science. (Kelly is the fourth from left).

14

T HE Y EARS OF

OF

W ORLD W AR II

AND THE

U NIVERSITY

M ARYLAND

The Yearbook of Fort Hays State College of 1943 (Gallery 1.5, Fig. 11) clearly testifies Kelly’s involvement in the participation of the United States in the World War II. Kelly writes: War clouds began to appear on the horizon in the late thirties and I was put in charge of the flight training program allocated to the college by the Civil Aeronautics Administration and I undertook to learn to fly myself. In the fall of 1943 I was commissioned in the U.S. Naval reserve and stationed in the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. [F1995:11]

Kelly joined one of several groups of naval air psychologists working on methods for the selection of cadets. In November of 1943 he went to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery of the Navy in Washington DC as a lieutenant, and remained in the Aviation Psychology Branch until 1945. The list of publications between 1944 and 1946 demonstrates the range of his interests. Some of his work has to do with selection and training, but also concerned computers and instrument panels, an heritage of his early formation in engineering. He spent five years in the services. In 1944 he obtained an associate professorship at the University of Maryland, where he stayed only one year. In 1946 he accepted the offer for a full professorhip and directorship of the Clinical Psychology program at the Ohio State University in Columbus, where he remained for nineteen years.

University of Maryland, College of Arts and Sciences.


From The Terrapin: Yearbook of the University of Maryland, 1946, p. 13

George A. Kelly wearing the uniform of the U.S. Navy, 1944. By kind courtesy of Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge

15

T HE Y EARS

AT THE

O HIO S TATE U NIVERSITY

When Kelly was appointed Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Carl R. Rogers had just left the same chair having been invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago. The names of Kelly and Rogers are often associated for their phenomenological approaches, for some affinities in their views of the therapeutic relationship, and for having been acknowledged as the founders of modern clinical psychology. The needs of veterans returning from World War II and the generous government fundings favoured the growth of trainings in clinical psychology. During that period another psychologist who contributed to clinical psychology is Victor Raimy (1913-1987), who graduated at Ohio State University in 1943 and was appointed Professor at the Department of Psychology of OSU during the same year as Kelly. Incidentally, Rogers was one of the reviewers of Kelly’s magnum opus (the other being Jerome Bruner), where both Rogers and Raimy are quoted as representatives of the Carl R. Rogers (1902-1987), ca. 1947. neophenomenological approach. During the first years at the OSU, Kelly wrote several manuscripts and conference addresses, mostly on the training in clinical psychology. In 1951 he presented an address at the U. S. Veterans Administration Hospital in Houston, TX, titled The psychology of personal constructs, probably the first presentation of the theory he was elaborating in those years and which will be published in 1955. His two-volume book was finished in 1953 and shipped off to the publishers when Kelly took his first sabbatical leave from Ohio State for a visiting appointment at Montclear State Teachers’ College in New Jersey to work on the use of television in classroom instruction [E2016:29].

The Ohio State University’s Armory and Gymnasium, damaged by fire in 1958 and demolished in 1959.


From https://www.flickr.com/photos/mytravelphotos/4248147371. Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0

Fransella [F1995] writes that it is difficult to know precisely when Kelly started work on the book, but it seems it must have been some time in the 1930s, when in Fort Hays Kansas State College. Kelly told Fransella that it would be the only one of the five books he had written to be published, and that that must have been a mistake! Brendan Maher, one of Kelly’s first students in OSU who will edit a collection of selected papers published

University Hall, ca. 1946.


From Makio Yearbook, 1946, p. 10

16

by Wiley in 1969, Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly, recalls:

G ALLERY 1.6 The Ohio State University Bulletin

As far as I can tell George did not contact any publisher at all, and at times it seemed as though the manuscript was something between a possible book and a very long working paper. When it was finally finished, it was typed up on the purple-inked ‘ditto’ paper that was then used to make copies. Twelve copies were made, packaged and addressed to leading publishers (without any advance warning to them, I believe) and taken to the Post Office by George and some students in George’s station-wagon. Not long after that I happened to have an appointment with him about something. When I entered his office he was sitting at his desk looking genuinely amazed, and pleased. Some publisher’s contracts lay on his desk. Not only was the book going to be published - he had a choice of publishers. He expressed his delight, and his surprise, and I do suspect that if the book had been rejected by all twelve, he would not have been entirely surprised. In George’s career there was something of the triumph of the tortoise over the hare. For a long time few people outside professional clinical psychology knew of his work. He had published few articles, and was not a regular performer at conventions and conferences. I think that the response to George’s book came as a surprise to some of his colleagues as well as Brendan A. Maher (1924-2009). From http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/10/brendan-arnold-maher/ t o G e o r g e h i m s e l f. [F1995:12]

After the publication of The Psychology of Personal Constructs and its recognition as a major development in the study of personality and psychotherapy, Kelly received many invitations to teach and lecture at universities all over the world. He held visiting appointments at the Southern Illinois University (1956), Syracuse University (1957), University of California (1959), Harvard University (1960), University of Nebraska (1962), Temple University (1962), Princeton University (1962), University of Houston (1965), University of Chicago (1965), and many more; he lectured at many other institutions in the United States, as well as in Europe (Copenhagen, 1961; London, 1964), the former Soviet Union (Moscow, 1961), South America and the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, 1959), and Asia. In a brief biographical sketch written in 1966 Kelly writes:

The Seventy-Seventh Annual Report of the President of the Ohio State University to the Board of Trustees, the Governor, and Citizens of Ohio, September 1948.

During the year 1960-61 my wife and I traveled around the world on a project financed by the Human Ecology Fund in an effort to apply the construct theory to certain international problems. Dur-

17

ing this trip I lectured in London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Louvain, Madrid, Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow.

The trip around the world is described with more details in Europe’s matrix of decision (1962): On the morning of June 9th, 1960 my wife and I boarded United Airlines Flight 610 at the spanking new air terminal in Columbus, Ohio. We were about to start a journey that would take us around the world and bring us face to face with people in 37 countries. My pocket was sagging with a two-inch-thick packet of tickets that were good for one year, and we were determined not to miss a single day of the adventure they promised us. The last entry on the last ticket read, “Chicago to Columbus, 5:10 P.M., June 8th, 1961” - we had allowed ourselves only seven hours to spare!

To give an idea of his style of presentation, it is worth quoting the introduction of the same paper he presented at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation in 1962: There is something you all should know at the outset of this paper: I have no use for the concept of motivation. Professor Jones was well aware of this last summer when he invited me to come here. We were having coffee together in Copenhagen–at least I remember it as coffee, although Dr. Jones says it was tea. I believe our wives were with us at the time. He doesn't remember that either. At any rate, he remembers that he invited me to come here. At the time, we both found the

The house in 171 Medick Way, Worthington, Ohio, where the Kelly family lived from 1956 to 1965. By kind courtesy of Jörn Scheer idea of my having to talk in public about motivation highly amusing. He probably still thinks it is funny, but, after the toil of preparing this paper, I am not so sure I still do. Nevertheless, here I am. Since that conversation I have pondered on a number of things, including the whimsical possibility of writing such a convincing paper that you would be moved to change the topic of this annual Nebraska conclave on "Snakes in Ireland." How much more to the point it would be if the topic were something like this: "What Is Everybody up to These Days?" or "What in the World Is Mankind about To Do to Itself?" or perhaps this one: "Isn't There Any Other Way of Coping with a Problem Besides Lying Down and Being Treated for It?" A good short title could, I think, be lifted from Hans Fallada's 1932 novel, Little Man, What Now? "The Nebraska Symposium on What Now"–not bad!

Notwithstanding this preamble that could have been interpreted as irreverent, the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1976 was devoted to Personal Construct Psychology, and it is considered by the Kellian community the first international congress on PCP.

The house in 688 Oxford Street, Worthington, Ohio, where the Kelly family lived from 1946 to 1954. By kind courtesy of Jörn Scheer

Another sketch of Kelly’s attitude towards psychology comes from the memories of Alvin Landfield, who completed his Masters and Doctoral research under his direction. Here is how he tells of his first encounter with Kelly.

18

I knocked on the door of Dr. Kelly's Office. A short, rotund, smiling man with an Irish face greeted me. “Come in Mr. Landfield, have a seat.” He sat down opposite me and leaned forward. “Mr. Landfield, what do you think Psychology is all about?” I responded with something about what I had learned at North Carolina. He swiveled his chair to the window. Then, he swiveled back and leaned forward. “That is all very interesting. Many Psychologists believe in what you have said. However, there are other ways to look at all of that.” The light bulb went on for me. I knew at that moment that I had to know more about this man and his thinking. [L2011:13]

Three years later, Landfield was given a Graduate Assistantship for two semesters. First, I was assigned to Dr. Boyd McCandless. He asked me to punch hundreds of IBM cards. The second semester, I was assigned to Dr. Kelly. When I asked him about my duties, he replied, “Oh, you might dust my books once in a while.” He smiled. One afternoon, I was working late in the secretarial office outside Dr. Kelly's office. I was coming up with some research ideas. I looked up when Dr. Kelly was leaving his office. Impulsively, I asked him if he could listen for several minutes to a research idea. He agreed to my request and sat on the edge of my work table. Quickly, I summarized my thoughts. He responded with the following statement: “Mr. Landfield, I don't follow all that you are saying, but I see the wheels going around.

The room where Kelly’s study was arranged in Medick Way. By kind courtesy of Jörn Scheer

Franz Epting in Kelly’s workshop.
 By kind courtesy of Jörn Scheer

The basement workshop with Kelly's notes. By kind courtesy of Jörn Scheer

Jack W. Brehm, W. Edgar Vinacke and George A. Kelly, three of the speakers at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1962. By permission of the Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

19

What is most important are those wheels going around.” He departed. He could have easily cut me down and made me feel like an idiot. I have known professors who would delight in having that kind of opportunity. Kelly supported my intention. Kelly did not give me many words of support during those years at OSU. However, when he did, his comments made a critical difference in my life. He always treated me with respect in his formal way. [L2011:13]

Kelly was elected President of the Consulting Division of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1954 and of the Clinical Division in the two-year period 1956-57. He had also served as Vice-President and President of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology (ABEPP), later renamed the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP) – the primary organization for specialty board certification in psychology – of which he was a charter member in 1947.

A portrait of Kelly recurring in Russian websites.

A heart attack that struck Kelly in August of 1959 at age 54 clouded this period of fame. He narrates the event and the repercussion on his family in a paper, Confusion and the clock, he had begun to write in that period and that he resumed some months later describing in detail his experience.

A popular photographic portrait of George Kelly while at the Ohio State University. By kind courtesy of Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge

20

George Kelly together with his wife, Gladys, his son, Joseph Vincent, and his daughter, Jacqueline. The picture was taken on the Sunday just prior to the Friday in August, 1959, when Kelly suffered his heart attack. Jacqueline is seven months pregnant and is staying with her folks while her first husband, George Edward Sharples, was stationed in Korea. By kind courtesy of Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge

A candid shot showing Kelly with his daughter Jacqueline and his grandson (May 1964). By kind courtesy of Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge

Jacqueline and her father in a picture taken about the same time (1959). By kind courtesy of Jacqueline Kelly Aldridge

21

T HE Y EARS

AT THE

B RANDEIS U NIVERSITY

In September 1965, after a nineteen year period at the Ohio State University, Kelly moved to Brandeis University, founded in 1948 as a non-sectarian Jewish community-sponsored private institution in Waltham, Massachusetts, 9 miles west of Boston. Here, at the invitation of Abraham Maslow, the prominent humanistic p s y c h o l ogist, Kelly received a prestigious appointment to the Riklis Chair of Behavioral Science. He took up the Distinguished Professional Chair in Theoretical Psychology. Kelly and his wife decided to live at Framingham, a town 12 miles west of the University.

The grave of George and Gladys Kelly at Walnut Grove Cemetery, Worthington, Ohio. By kind courtesy of Jörn Scheer

When in Waltham, he wrote several manuscripts; among them, A brief introduction to personal construct theory, published three times posthumously. Maybe, his last writing is Experimental dependency, unfinished. On March 6, 1967, a month before his 62nd birthday, George A. Kelly passed away due to complications following a gall bladder operation. The grave is at Walnut Grove Cemetery at Worthington, Ohio, resting close to his wife Gladys, who died on January 13, 2004, at the Fairhaven Health Center in Sykesville, Maryland.

Abraham H. Maslow (1908-1970)

22

APPENDIX 5: G ALLERY 1.1: Reveille, Yearbook of Fort Hays State College (Source: Forsyth Library Archives and Special Collections, Fort Hays State University)

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1933. Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1932.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1934 (Kelly’s surname is at last amended).

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1935.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1936.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1937.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1938. Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1939.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1940.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1942.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1943.

Reveille (Yearbook of Fort Hays State College), 1943.

APPENDIX 6: G ALLERY 1.2: The Ohio State University Bulletin

EDUCATION

Yr\

THE VETERAN MOVES IN . . . Seventy-Seventh Annual Report of the President of the Ohio State University to

3,962, an increase of nearly 60 per cent over the peak enrollment of the preceding year. This figure gives no fair picture of the instructional load carried by schools and departments of the College, since it does not include the 1,224 graduate students in education, psychology, music, fine arts, and physical education. Graduate and undergraduate students for whose guidance and instruction the College took major responsibility in 1946-1947 totaled 5,186. About fOUI-fifths of those enrolled in the College were preparing to teach; the remainder sought degrees in such fields as fine arts, music, and occupational therapy. Among the 407 students graduated by the College, the proportion of prospective teachers was even higher. There is evidence that the task of alleviating Ohio's severe teacher shortage is being accomplished more rapidly than anyone had dared to hope, and that in a few areas (notably history and the social studies) the next year or two may see the problem of teacher shortage converted into one of over-supply. The College, through its advisory program, is continuing its efforts to interest appropriate students in those teaching fields where shortages are still acute. Department of Education.-The end of the war brought an influx of graduate students whose work had been interrupted for periods ranging from one to five years. In the summer of 1946, 91 persons completed their work for the Master's degree as compared with 48 in 1945. Indications at the beginning of the 1947 summer quarter were that more than 100 students would complete Master's degrees and 10 would complete Ph.D. degrees. Undergraduate enrollments increased in industrial arts, elementary education, and the teaching fields of science, mathematics, and social studies. There was a substantial increase in the number of student teachers in elementary education, social studies, mathematics, and science. In planning to meet more effectively

the needs of the schools of the state, the Department has expanded its program and its staff. Twelve new courses have been approved strengthening the Department's offerings in elementary education, philosophy, secondary education, and the teaching fields of mathematics, science, English, and social studies. In response to the request of the State Department of Education, the Department is planning to enter the fields of trades and industries education and distributive education. For several years, the Department has offered a minor in library science. The new regulations of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools requiring all North Central schools to have trained librarians beginning with the school year 1952-1953 demand the expansion of the present minor to a major. Throughout the year, the Department in its regular meetings continued its discussion of general education. The results of a survey of general education in the Department's courses will serve as an important basis for the reconstruction of our offerings to the end that teachers and administrators may be better prepared for dealing with the responsibilities of education in the postwar world. Special features of the 1946 summer quarter were a refresher course for graduate students who had spent one or more years in the armed services, an intercultural workshop, a mathematics workshop, and a reading workshop.

Department of Psychology. - Enrollment in the. Department of Psychology continued to increase at about the same rate as during the previous year. E?rollment for the year in all courses I.Il the Department totaled II,959. Tbe greatest increase was in graduate courses, where the number of students has more than trebled since 1944-1945. For the Department as a whole, enrollment has more than doubled within this same period.

Board of Trustees, the Governor, and Citizens of Ohio

The Seventy-Seventh Annual Report of the President of the Ohio State University to the Board of Trustees, the Governor, and Citizens of Ohio, September 1948.

Enrollment in the Department of Psychology more than doubled since 1944-45.

EDUCATION

In the service courses at the 400 level, enrollmen t for the year totaled 6,473. In addition, the Department staffed several sections of education survey with teachers of the beginning psychology courses, so that some freshmen students in the College of Education could have continuous contact with the same instructor throughout the first year. The great increase in enrollment in the elementary service courses was met by grouping all students in beginning psychology in a single large lecture section which filled an auditorium. This expedient is obviously undesirable, but the demand for trained psychologists is at present so great that it is impossible to bid successfully for the services of competent junior staff members in sufficient numbers to permit a more effective student-teacher ratio. The Department fully recognizes the importance of changing this situation as quickly as conditions will permit. The Department has developed a required curriculum for Arts College students majoring in psychology. It has also developed an elementary psychology course specifically designed as an alternative in the required biological science sequence of the Arts College. . The demand for clinical psychologists IS tremendous-the Veterans Administration alone wants six hundred, and there are not that many adequately trained clinical psychologists in the country. The Department has had ten trainees in clinical psychology under the Veterans Administration program and plans to take about ten more next year, along with several others under a program sponsored by the U. S. Public Health Service. The case load in the Psychological Clinic, the Student Consultation Service, and the Remedial Aids Center has shown some incr e·ase. Many veterans come to these agencies with family problems and problems of mental adjustment. The agencies also serve the program of the Department by furnishing (along with

39

the Bureau of Juvenile Research, the Occupational Opportunities Service, the collits and the schools) internship facilities for the many graduate students who are coming to the Department for training as vocational counselors. Staff changes at the senior level during the year included the appointment of Professors George A. Kelly and Victor C. Raimy in the Clinic, Professor Delos O. Wickens in the elementary area, and Professor Arthur W. Melton in general psychology. Aside from the usual research conducted by members of the instructional staff and by graduate students working on theses, several major projects deserve special mention. The research on educational acceleration has been virtually completed. Several publications growing out of this study have attracted national attention. A project on teaching aids is in progress for the United States Navy. A confidential research project in the field of radar is being conducted for military authorities. In the Civilian Aviation Program sponsored by the National Research Council an inquiry has been completed into the question of whether persons with visual defects can learn to fiy satisfactorily and a project is now under way having to do with stall indicators. Plans have been made for a comprehensive research project sponsored by the U. S. Public Health Service and involving several other institutions which looks toward the development of more effective psychometric techniques. School of Fine and Applied /hts .The enrollment of 1945-1946, which seemed the limit of the School's capacities, was exceeded by 1,489 during the year 1946-1947. This increased load brought many problems in maintaining the standards of instruction and in utilizing scarce space and equipment. Ten new teachers in various ranks were employed (one new teacher for each 150 new students), and Fine Arts classes were scattered over six different

Communication of the appointment of Professors George A. Kelly and Victor C. Raimy in the Clinic.

C HAPTER 2

Personal Construct Theory

Kelly expounded personal construct theory in his work in two volumes The Psychology of Personal Constructs, published by Norton, New York, in 1955. Volume one (xviii+556 pages) is titled A Theory of Personality, volume two (x+661 pages) Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. In 1963 Norton published A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs, a paperback edition consisting of the first three chapters of Kelly’s twovolume work. The whole book was reprinted by Routledge, in association with the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology, London, in 1991.

S ECTION 1

The Book

The Psychology of Personal Constructs is the end product of the long-lasting experience of George A. Kelly in the fields of personality and clinical psychology, and its writing presumably took many years. Though the work of an only person, Kelly at various times acknowledges the contribution of a group of colleagues and students willing to listen and discuss every Thursday night the first-draft manuscript that Kelly had written during the week. Here is how Kelly describes this experience in the preface of the book: This weekly ordeal lasted for three long years. It was painfully stimulating. Attendance ran as high as thirty and pages covered in an evening ran as low as one. That either the writer or the manuscript survived at all is entirely due to the psychological perceptiveness of colleagues who, somehow, always found a way to strike a gentle balance between pity and realism.

According to his daughter Jacqueline, Gladys was an eager hostess, and enjoyed entertaining the Thursday-nighters. Kelly lists the more regular participants: James Bieri, Jean Burton, Richard B. Cravens, Robert E. Fager, Alvin R. Howard, Robert E. Jones, Alvin W. Landfield, Leon H. Levy, Sue P. Lloyd, Richard M. Lundy, William H. Lyle Jr., Brendan Maher, Joseph M. Masling, James W. Rohrer, Henry Samuels, Donald Shoemaker, E. Philip Trapp, and Jane H. Wooster. Many of them have later on given important contributions to the development of PCP. In contrast to the number of people acknowledged, the bibliography comprises only 41 references at the end of Volume 1 and no reference at all at the end of Volume 2, which appears a bit too scarce for a work of 1217 pages! Not only: a good 30 of the references are unpublished M.A. theses and Ph.D. theses discussed by Kelly’s students at the Ohio State University in late years, and 2 are M.A. theses done at Fort Hays Kansas State College. Kelly himself appears only once, as coauthor with A. R. Howard of an article on psychological movement published in

1954. It is easy to quote the authors of the eight remaining references: J. Benjamins, J. Bieri, J. F. T. Bugental, O. Fenichel, J. M. Hadley, P. Lecky, C. R. Rogers, and J. B. Rotter. Carl Rogers had left the Ohio State University at the time of Kelly’s arrival, while Julian Rotter had joined the same faculty in the fall of 1945. Kelly recognizes the similarities (not disregarding the differences) between personal construct theory and Rogers’ client-centered approach, as well as with other neophenomenological systems: Raimy’s self-concept theory, Lecky’s self-consistency theory, and Snygg and Combs’s phenomenal field approach. However, Kelly maintains that Rogers’ position “has not been stated in terms of a psychological theory, [...] being more deeply rooted in certain philosophical convictions regarding the nature of man, and society’s proper relationship to him” [K1955:41]. All things considered, Kelly borrows from Rogers only the term “client” in place of “patient”. As to Rotter, in 1954 he had published his main work, Social Learning and Clinical Psychology, in which he laid out the basic tenets of his social learning theory. However, Kelly does not make reference to this theory, but to Rotter’s Incomplete Sentences Test, “perhaps the least threatening type of projective test in relation to what it reveals about the client” [K1955:981]. From whom then did Kelly draw inspiration? Even though not listed in the references, there are other philosophers and psychologists Kelly gave only passing mention in his book – together with novelists, and mythological and biblical figures. The most quoted is Sigmund Freud (whose name appears in thirteen pages), but of course Kelly mostly distances himself from the Viennese psychoanalyst. He pays an explicit tribute only to John Dewey, the American pragmatist “whose philosophy and psychology can be read between many of the lines of the psychology of personal constructs” [K1955:154]. Dewey “emphasized the anticipatory nature of behavior and the person’s use of hypotheses in thinking” [K1955:129], in a way that parallels Kelly’s metaphor of the person-as-a-

John Dewey (1859-1952)

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scientist. Even though cited only a few times – usually together – in the 1955 book and later in The autobiography of a theory [K1963], Korzybski and Moreno seem especially influential in Kelly’s development of his personality theory and role therapy. Actually, Kelly writes that “In 1939 the writer began to piece together his interpretation of the writings of Korzybski and Moreno with certain observations arising out of his own clinical experience” [K1955:360]. But the influence of Korzybski and Moreno on the development of Kelly’s ideas is also documented by the notes taken by one of his early students, John R. Barry, at Ohio State University, during a series of lectures given by Kelly in November and December of 1948 [SB1991:125]. The Polish-American semanticist Alfred Korzybski had published Science and Sanity in 1933. Curiously, Korzybski like Kelly had been educated in engineering. In this book, Korzybski lays the foundation for a new discipline, General Semantics. One of the basic tenets of general semantics is that human beings cannot experience the world directly, but only through their abstractions derived from language; therefore, the structure of languages limits our understanding, whenever there is a lack of similarity of structure with what is actually happening – “the map is not the territory” is one of Korbyzski’s most famous premises. The reading of Science and Sanity raised questions in Kelly about the interrelation between language and thought: “Not only did it seem that the words man uses give and hold the structure of his thought, but, more particularly, the names by which he calls himself give and hold the structure of his personality.” [K1963:56]. Besides, the similarity between Korzybski’s epistemology and Kelly’s assumption of constructive alternativism appears rather clear. From the notes taken by Barry it appears that Kelly was citing those parts of Korzybski that dealt with semantic changes as a form of psychotherapy.

Alfred H. S. Korzybski (1879-1950)

There is in Korzybski a more specific aspect that is likely to have struck Kelly: the idea that certain uses of the verb to be in the subject-

predicate form are a sort of linguistic trap since they lead to the conviction that every fact consists in some thing having some quality. A student of Korzybski, D. David Bourland, Jr., came to the idea of E-Prime, a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be. Kelly went back to the issue in 1964 in The language of hypothesis: Man’s psychological instrument. In this article, however, Kelly pays his tribute to a German philosopher, Hans Vaihinger, author of The Philosophy of “As If ” (1911), who had profoundly influenced also the ideas of Alfred Adler. Vaihinger argued that human beings can never really know the underlying Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933) reality of the world, and that consequently we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models. But all matters confronting people might best be regarded in hypothetical ways: which leads Kelly to propose a new grammar mood: the invitational mood, instead of the indicative, conditional, subjunctive, or imperative one. The invitational mood would suggest to the listener that a certain novel interpretation of an object might be entertained; for example, “Suppose we regard the floor as if it were hard.” This formulation suggests that the floor is opened to a variety of interpretations, whereas in the proposition “The floor is hard” the subject-predicate relationship inheres in the subject itself: that is the nature of the floor, regardless of who says so. Moreno’s psychodrama appears to have performed an important function in specifying the social form of Kelly’s constructivism. Jacob L. Moreno was a RomanianAmerican psychiatrist and psychosociologist, regarded as the pioneer of group psychotherapy. Moreno’s psychodramatic techniques are described in a lengthy article that Kelly had read according to Barry, “Inter-personal therapy and the psychopathology of inter-personal relations”, published in the first issue of the journal Sociometry in 1937. Here Moreno introduces techniques of spontaneous improvisation, self-presentation, and two types of soliloquies. Kelly was attracted to Moreno’s work probably because the psychiatrist was reporting phenomena similar to those observed by himself in his teaching and early clinical experiences.

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Jacob L. Moreno (1889-1974)

In introducing Fixed-Role Therapy - a therapeutic approach based upon the self-characterization - Kelly reports four types of clinical observations which set the stage for reading Moreno’s writings [K1955:362-368]. All of them had been dramatics experiences that not only showed lasting effects, but also led Kelly to ask himself: “ What would happen if we took the general view that what people do is a feature of what they are; that the extent to which a person behaves in a certain way is a measure of the extent to which he is that kind of person?” [K1955:363]: a question dating back to the period in which Kelly was attending high-school!

It is very likely that Kelly borrowed more heavily from Moreno’s spontaneous improvisation in formulating the techniques of his casual enactments and fixed-role therapy [SB1991:132]. By adopting methods that require persons to enact a role so as to change the way they construe themselves and others, Kelly was specifying that construction and reconstruction necessarily occur in relation to the self and others. Eva Korn photographer, c. 1961

Though quoted only once in his published writings in a section on the mathematics of conceptualization [K1955:305], Kelly acknowledged the influence of Johann F. Herbart, the German philosopher, psychologist and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline. In a personal communication to Dennis N. Hinkle, one of his students at the Ohio State University, Kelly said: “Johann Herbart’s work on education and particularly mathematical psychology influenced me. I think mathematics is the pure instance of construct functioning–the model of human behaviour.” Moreover, writing about Herbart in 1932 in an unpublished book called Understandable Psychology, Kelly states:

One can find in this passage the reference to a view of knowledge as a recursive process, embedded in the Modulation Corollary. To conclude this section on the inspirers of Kelly’s ideas, it is worth mentioning Miller Mair (1937-2011), a Scottish psychologist who made a great contribution to the elaboration of PCP as a storytelling psychology. Mair believed that Kelly might have been influenced by a Scottish, presbyterian philosopher, John Macmurray. Kelly never cites him, but may have Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) made the acquaintance of Macmurray’s ideas during his stay in Edinburgh. Actually, the parallels between the two are striking. Macmurray holds the primacy of action over theory in human life, and the essentially relational nature of human beings. He looked to infancy and early childhood for evidence of the universal desire for relationship. In the introduction to The Self as Agent (1957) Macmurray writes: The simplest expression that I can find for the thesis I have tried to maintain is this: All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action for the sake of friendship."

Actually, this is an aphorism to which Kelly would have likely subscribed with pleasure.

According to [Herbart’s] doctrine of the apperceptive mass the mind could not accept a new idea unless it fitted into the ideas which were conscious at the time. In trying to recall or set up an idea the apperceptive mass, or background of previous experience, must always be taken into consideration. Our perceptions are then really more than perceptions, they are apperceptions, experiences into which all past experiences are fused as well as the object of the moment. [BJ2008:242] John Macmurray (1891-1976)

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S ECTION 2

VOLUME TWO

Contents

Preface to Volume Two 11. The Role of the Psychotherapist 12. The Psychotherapeutic Approach 13. The Appraisal of Experiences

VOLUME ONE Preface to Volume One The Editor’s Introduction 1. Constructive Alternativism 2. Basic Theory 3. The Nature of Personal Constructs 4. The Clinical Setting 5. The Repertory Test 6. The Mathematical Structure of Psychological Space 7. The Analysis of Self-Characterization

14. The Appraisal of Activities 15. Steps in Diagnosis 16. Disorders of Construction 17. Disorders of Transition 18. Elaborating the Complaint 19. Elaborating the Personal System

The paperback edition of 1963, consisting of the first three chapters of Volume 1 with some revision.

20. Loosening and Tightening 21. Producing Psychotherapeutic Movement 22. Special Techniques in Psychotherapy Index

8. Fixed-role Therapy 9. Dimensions of Diagnosis 10. Dimensions of Transitions Bibliography Index

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S ECTION 3

C OROLLARIES

Basic Theory

CONSTRUCTION COROLLARY

A person anticipates events by construing their replications. INDIVIDUALITY COROLLARY

Persons differ from each other in their construction of events. ORGANIZATION COROLLARY

Each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs. DICHOTOMY COROLLARY

C ONSTRUCTIVE A LTERNATIVISM All of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement.

A person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs. CHOICE COROLLARY

A person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system. RANGE COROLLARY

F UNDAMENTAL P OSTULATE A person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events. D EFINITION OF P ERSONAL C ONSTRUCT The construct denotes an aspect of the elements lying within its range of convenience, on the basis of which at least two elements are similar and contrast with a third.

A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only. EXPERIENCE COROLLARY

A person’s construction system varies as he successively construes the replications of events. MODULATION COROLLARY

The variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the construct within whose range of convenience the variants lie. FRAGMENTATION COROLLARY

A person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other. COMMONALITY COROLLARY

To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to those of the other person. SOCIALITY COROLLARY

To the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person.

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F ORMAL A SPECTS

OF

C ONSTRUCTS

RANGE OF CONVENIENCE A construct’s range of convenience comprises all those things to which the user would find its application useful. FOCUS OF CONVENIENCE

A constructs focus of convenience comprises those particular things to which the user would find its application maximally useful. These are the elements upon which the construct is likely to have been formed originally. ELEMENTS The things or events which are abstracted by a person’s use of a construct are called elements. In some systems these are called objects. CONTEXT The context of a construct comprises those elements among which the user ordinarily discriminates by means of the construct. It is somewhat more restricted than the range of convenience, since it refers to the circumstances in which the construct emerges for practical use, and not necessarily to all the circumstances in which a person might eventually use the construct. It is somewhat more extensive than the focus of convenience, since the construct may often appear in circumstances where its application is not optimal.

EMERGENCE The emergent pole of a construct is that one which embraces most of the immediately perceived context. IMPLICITNESS The implicit pole of a construct is that one which embraces contrasting context. It contrasts with the emergent pole. Frequently the person has no available symbol or name for it; it is symbolized only implicitly by the emergent term. SYMBOL An element in the context of a construct which represents not only itself but also the construct by which it is abstracted by the user is called the construct’s symbol. PERMEABILITY A construct is permeable if it admits newly perceived elements to its context. It is impermeable if it rejects elements on the basis of their newness.

C ONSTRUCTS C LASSIFIED A CCORDING TO N ATURE OF THEIR C ONTROL OVER THEIR 
 E LEMENTS

THE




POLE Each construct discriminates between two poles, one at each end of its dichotomy. The elements abstracted are like each other at each pole with respect to the construct and are unlike the elements at the other pole. CONTRAST

PREEMPTIVE CONSTRUCT A construct which preempts its elements for membership in its own realm exclusively is called a preemptive construct. This is the "nothing but" type of construction – "If this is a ball it is nothing but a ball."

The relationship between the two poles of a construct is one of contrast.

CONSTELLATORY CONSTRUCT

LIKENESS END

A construct which fixes the other realm memberships of its elements is called a constellatory construct. This is stereotyped or typological thinking.

When referring specifically to elements at one pole of a construct, one may use the term "likeness end" to designate that pole. CONTRAST END When referring specifically to elements at one pole of a construct, one may use the term "contrast end" to designate the opposite pole.

PROPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCT A construct which carries no implications regarding the other realm memberships of its elements is a propositional construct. This is uncontaminated construction.

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S ECTION 4

COMPREHENSIVE CONSTRUCTS

Diagnostic Constructs

INCIDENTAL CONSTRUCTS

A comprehensive construct is one which subsumes a wide variety of events.

An incidental construct is one which subsumes a narrow variety of events. SUPERORDINATE CONSTRUCTS

A superordinate construct is one which includes another as one of the elements in its context.

GENERAL DIAGNOSTIC CONSTRUCTS PREVERBAL CONSTRUCTS

A preverbal construct is one which continues to be used, even though it has no consistent word symbols. It may or may not have been devised before the person had command of speech. SUBMERGENCE The submerged pole of a construct is the one which is less available for application to events.

SUBORDINATE CONSTRUCTS

A subordinate construct is one which is included as an element in the context of another. REGNANT CONSTRUCTS

A regnant construct is a kind of superordinate construct which assigns each of its elements to a category on an all-or-none basis, as in classical logic. It tends to be nonabstractive. CORE CONSTRUCTS

A core construct is one which governs the person's maintenance processes.

SUSPENSION

PERIPHERAL CONSTRUCTS

A suspended element is one which is omitted from the context of a construct as the result of revision of the person's construct system.

A peripheral construct is one which can be altered without serious modification of the core structure.

LEVEL OF COGNITIVE AWARENESS

TIGHT CONSTRUCTS

The level of cognitive awareness ranges from high to low. A high-level construct is one which is readily expressed in socially effective symbols; whose alternatives are both readily accessible; which falls well within the range of convenience of the client's major constructions; and which is not suspended by its superordinating constructs.

A tight construct is one which leads to unvarying predictions.

DILATION

The constructs by which certain persons are construed by the child in relation to his or her own survival. They collect both persons and a particular kind of event under the same rubric.

Dilation occurs when a person broadens his perceptual field in order to reorganize it on a more comprehensive level. It does not, in itself, include the comprehensive reconstruction of those elements. CONSTRICTION

Constriction occurs when a person narrows his perceptual field in order to minimize apparent incompatibilities.

LOOSE CONSTRUCTS

A loose construct is one which leads to varying predictions but retains its identity. DEPENDENCY CONSTRUCTS

ROLE CONSTRUCTS

The constructs which have as elements the construction processes of other people.

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CONSTRUCTS RELATING TO TRANSITION

THREAT

Threat is the awareness of an imminent comprehensive change in one's core structures. FEAR

Fear is the awareness of an imminent incidental change in one's core structures. ANXIETY

Anxiety is the awareness that the events with which one is confronted lie outside the range of convenience of his construct system. GUILT

Guilt is the awareness of dislodgment of the self from one's core role structure. AGGRESSIVENESS

Aggressiveness is the active elaboration of one's perceptual field. HOSTILITY

Hostility is the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already been recognized as a failure. C-P-C CYCLE

The C-P-C Cycle is a sequence of construction which involves in succession, circumspection, preemption, and control, and leads to a choice precipitating the person into a particular situation. IMPULSIVITY

Impulsivity is a characteristic foreshortening of the C-P-C Cycle. CREATIVITY CYCLE

The Creativity Cycle is one which starts with loosened construction and terminates with tightened and validated construction. EXPERIENCE CYCLE

The unity of experience is a cycle embracing five phases: anticipation, investment, encounter, confirmation or disconfirmation, and constructive revision.

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C HAPTER 3

The Exploration of Personal Construct Systems

In his main work of 1955, Kelly described three instruments aimed at exploring personal construct systems: the Role Construct Repertory Test (more commonly, Repertory Grid or RepGrid), the Situational Resources Repertory Test (more commonly, Dependency Grid or DepGrid), and the Self-Characterization. Other instruments have been added to these in the following years, devised by other authors. Some of them are also very popular in the psychological literature outside PCP.

By kind courtesy of Valerie Beeby http://purple-owl.com

REPERTORY GRID The RepGrid allows understanding of how people construe a part of their experiential reality. After having selected a number (usually 12-20) of elements (in a clinical setting, usually significant people) to be written at the top of the columns, the person is asked to compare and contrast successive sets of triads (for example, myself, my mother, my father) and formulate “some important way in which two of the figures are alike, and different from the third.” The three elements represent the basis for the elicitation of personal constructs. The constructs are written in the rows according to the verbal labels used by the person, and a convention is used to record the application of each construct to all the elements in the columns. Depending on the convention chosen, it is customary to distinguish binary, ranking, and rating grids. The grid is amenable to a wide range of analyses, nowadays facilitated by a number of computer programs, many of which available via the Internet. Analyses include: • correlations between constructs, suggesting that two or more constructs tend to be applied together, forming a sort of semantic space; • correlations between elements, showing the perceived distances between them, allowing a number of thematic analyses: for example, the distance between “self ” (“I as I am”) and “ideal self ” (“I as I would like to be”), used as an index of selfesteem; the distance between “self ” and “social self ”(“I as seen by others”), index of comprehension; the distance between “ideal self ” and “future self ” (“I as I expect to be” in a given future”), index of expectancy of change; the distance between “self ” and “others” (the average distance between the element self and each of the other not-self elements), index of social isolation; • a number of more or less complex statistical analyses aimed at calculating several cognitive measures, such as: • intensity, regarded as related to a dimension of tightness/looseness, and therefore able to discriminate between thought disordered schizophrenics and other psychiatric and normal groups according to Bannister's (1960) hypothesis of serial invalidation; • cognitive complexity, a measure defined as the capacity to construe social behaviour in a multidimensional way, and therefore relative to the number of independent discriminations available to the person;

• extremity ratings, the extent to which people tend to use the extreme points in bipolar scales as opposed to the more central points, indicating, depending on the authors, maladjustment or personal meaningfulness; • ordination and superordinacy, measures aimed at assessing a dimension of subordinacy/superordinacy between constructs; • articulation, a measure aimed at judging the structure of personal construct systems in terms of their being articulated (the normal conceptual structure), or non-articulated (the obsessional conceptual structure), that is, monolithic or segmented. • principal components analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis, correspondence analysis, all aimed at somehow mapping the structure of personal construct systems in terms of their components (elements, constructs, groups of constructs) and the distances between them. Particular types of repertory grids have been invented for specific purposes.

DEPENDENCY GRID The DepGrid is aimed at assessing the dispersion of dependency. In its original formulation the grid contains a list of 23 problem situations which are likely to be relevant for most people. The person selects, from a list of role titles, the people they believe have or have had an important part in their life. The person is allowed to indicate more than one individual for each role, and to include people who are dead or not geographically close. The indication of a minimum of ten resources is encouraged. Sometimes, the element `myself ' is introduced by the administrator as the last resource in the grid. The following instructions are then supplied: “Think of a time when you had the most problem with ‘x’. If these people had been around at that time, to whom would you have gone for help?” Participants note down with a tick which people they would have turned to for help. It is specified that for each problem situation more choices are possible, and that the self category can be filled in addition to going to others or as a choice between either themselves or others. Face inspection yields information as to whether the person tends to call on everyone for every kind of help or to turn prevailingly to one or two people (both strategies would indicate a relatively undispersed dependency), or the ticks are almost distributed among the resources (dispersed dependency). Nowadays, statistical ways to determine relative dispersion of dependency other than by inspection have been presented.

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SELF-CHARACTERIZATION The Self-characterization technique is the one which best fits the basic assumption of personal construct theory as a narrative approach to psychology. The person is asked to characterize himself or herself according to the following request: «I want you to write a character sketch of [Harry Brown], just as if he were the principal character in a play. Write it as it might be written by a friend who knew him very intimately and very sympathetically , perhaps better than anyone ever really could know him. Be sure to write it in the third person. For example, start out by saying, ‘Harry Brown is. . .’» The term “character sketch” permits the client more latitude than terms such as “self-description”, “self-analysis” and the like. The term “sketch”, as well as the invitation to use the third person, conveys the idea that the wholeness of the characterisation is important, rather than detailed elements or a catalogue of faults. Also the suggestion to write as if in the role of a friend encourages a construction of the client from an “external” point of view, while the phrase “perhaps better than anyone ever really could know him” tends to free certain clients from writing the sketch as some actual, known person would write it. “Intimately” indicates that something more than superficial appearances is to be covered by the client, and “sympathetically” is likely to encourage an acceptance of themselves and thus a narrative of what they are, rather than of what they are not, or ought to be. An overall purpose of such instructions is that of minimizing threat, placing the client “in a protected spot within a loosely construed system which has the given dimensions of first, second, and third persons, friendship, intimacy, and sympathy” (K1955:243). Kelly suggests various techniques for the analysis of self-characterizations to bring them into focus. They are qualitative techniques of text analysis, in a contemporary language, consisting of • the observation of sequence and transition, starting from the assumption that the protocol represents a true continuity; • the observation of organization, seeking the topic sentences; • the reflection against context, consisting in understanding the meaning of each statement in the context of the protocol as a whole;

• the collation of terms, observing the terms which are repeated as such or through their personal equivalents, and the linkages between terms; • the shifting of emphasis, so as to experiment with alternative emphases and inflections in reading each sentence and paragraph; • the restatement of the argument, with the psychologist trying, from time to time, to express the same theme in his or her own words, in the attempt to subsume the client's point of view. The psychologist then proceeds to the analysis of contextual areas invoked by the protocol, consisting in paying attention to the topical areas selected by the clients, within which they identify themselves. The thematic analysis is relative to the cause-effect relationships, that is, the client's reasons and explanations. Even more meaningful to the therapist's understanding of the client's constructions is the dimensional analysis, where the emphasis is placed upon similarities and contrasts, so as to understand the dichotomized alternatives the client continually has to choose from. The final step consists of the professional subsuming of personal constructs: as in the therapeutic conversations, the therapist will try to reach a professional construction of their understanding of the client's construction system by means of professional constructs, also called diagnostic constructs.

ESSENTIAL READINGS Beail, N. (Ed.). (1985). Repertory grid technique and personal constructs: Applications in clinical & educational settings. London: Croom Helm. Fransella, F., & Dalton, P. (1990). Personal construct counseling in action. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fransella, F., Bell, R. C., & Bannister, D. (2003). A manual for repertory grid technique (2nd ed.). Chichester, UK: Wiley. Jankowicz, A. D. (2003). The easy guide to repertory grids. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Fromm, M. (2004). Introduction to the repertory grid interview. Münster: Waxmann. Caputi, P., Viney, L.L., Walker, B.M., Crittenden, N. (Eds.) (2012). Personal construct methodology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Denicolo, P., Long, T., Bradley-Cole, K. (2016). Constructivist approaches and research methods: A practical guide to exploring personal meanings. London: Sage.

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C HAPTER 4

PCT in Relation to Other Psychological and Philosophical Approaches

Personal construct theory eludes being framed in the pigeonholes of the more traditional schools of psychology. Still, many authors have tried to classify it, and others have pointed to its affinity with several psychological and philosophical perspectives.

It is worth quoting the following story narrated by Kelly. I have been so puzzled over the early labeling of personal construct theory as “cognitive” that several years ago I set out to write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part of cognitive theory. The manuscript was about a third completed when I gave a lecture at Harvard University with the title, “Personal Construct Theory as a Line of Inference.” Following the lecture, Professor Gordon Allport explained to the students that my theory was not a “cognitive” theory but an “emotional” theory. Later the same afternoon, Dr. Henry Murray called me aside and said, “You know, don't you, that you are really an existentialist.” Since that time I stepped into almost all the open manholes that psychological theorists can possibly fall into. For example, in Warsaw, where I thought my lecture on personal construct theory would be an open challenge to dialectical materialism, the Poles, who had been conducting some seminars on personal construct theory before my arrival, explained to me that “personal construct theory was just exactly what dialectical materialism stood for.” Along the way also I have found myself classified in a volume on personality theories as one of the “learning theorists,” a classification that seems to me so patently ridiculous that I have gotten no end of amusement out of it. A few years ago an orthodox psychoanalyst insisted, after hearing me talk about psychotherapy, that, regardless of what I might say about Freud, and regardless even of my failure to fall in the apostolic succession to which a personal psychoanalysis entitled one, I was really “a psychoanalyst.” This charge was repeated by a couple of psychoanalytically sophisticated psychiatrists in London last fall, and nothing I could say would shake their conviction. I have, of course, been called a Zen Buddhist, and last fall one of our former students, now a distinguished psychologist, who was invited back to give a lecture, spent an hour and a half in a seminar corrupting my students with the idea that I was really a “behaviorist.” [K1965:216-217]

The book Kelly would have liked to write but did not have time to finish would have been titled The Human Feeling or Personal Construct Theory: A Theory of the Human Passions. It seems easy to share the comment that PCT “has a lot of second cousins but no siblings [as if] the theory was of parthenogenetic origin.” [S1977:208] Of course, it is possible to construe similarities and differences between PCT and other perspectives. Some of them have been more frequently highlighted. The following is a list of references clustered around several perspectives.

PCT AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Warren, W. G. (1990). Is personal construct psychology a cognitive psychology? International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 3, 393-414. Adams-Webber, J. R. (1990). Personal construct theory and cognitive science. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 3, 415-421. Warren, W. G. (1991). Rising up from down under: A response to Adams-Webber on cognitive psychology and personal construct theory. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 4, 43-49. Warren, B. (1991). Concepts, constructs, cognitive psychology, and personal construct theory. The Journal of Psychology, 125, 525-536. Winter, D. A., & Watson, S. (1999). Personal construct psychotherapy and the cognitive therapies: Different in theory but can they be differentiated in practice? Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 12, 1-22. PCT AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM Chiari, G., & Nuzzo, M. L. (1996). Personal construct theory within psychological constructivism: Precursor or avant-garde? In B. M. Walker, J. Costigan, L. L. Viney & B. Warren (Eds.), Personal construct theory: A psychology for the future (pp. 25-54). Sydney: The Australian Psychological Society. Chiari, G., & Nuzzo, M. L. (1996). Psychological constructivisms: A metatheoretical differentiation. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 9, 163-184. Chiari, G., & Nuzzo, M. L. (2004). Steering personal construct theory toward hermeneutic constructivism. In S. K. Bridges & J. D. Raskin (Eds.), Studies in meaning 2: Bridging the personal and social in constructivist psychology (pp. 51-65). New York: Pace University Press. Raskin, J. D. (2002) Constructivism in psychology: Personal construct psychology, radical constructivism, and social constructionism. American Communication Journal, 5, 3. Retrievable from: http://www1.appstate.edu/orgs/acjournal/holdings/vol5/iss3/special/raskin.pdf Raskin, J. D., Weihs, K. D., & Morano, L. A. (2005). Personal construct psychotherapy meets constructivism: Convergence, divergence, possibility. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (Eds.), Personal construct psychotherapy: Advances in theory, practice and research (pp. 3-20). London: Whurr. Raskin, J. D. (2016). Personal construct psychology in relation to an integrative constructivism. In D. A. Winter & N. Reed (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of personal construct psychology (pp. 34-44). London: Wiley.

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PCT AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

PCT AND PRAGMATISM

Mancuso, J. C. (1996). Constructionism, personal construct psychology and narrative psychology. Theory & Psychology, 6, 47-70.

Butt, T. (2001). Social action and personal constructs. Theory & Psychology, 11, 75-95.

Burkitt, I. (1996). Social and personal constructs: A division left unresolved. Theory & Psychology, 6, 71-77. Wortham, S. (1996). Are constructs personal? Theory & Psychology, 6, 79-84. Warren, B. (2004). Construing constructionism: Some reflections on the tension between PCP and social constructionism. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 1, 3444. Pavlović, J. (2011). Personal construct psychology and social constructionism are not incompatible: Implications of a reframing. Theory & Psychology, 21, 396-411. Efran, J. S., McNamee, S., Warren, B., & Raskin, J. D. (2014). Personal construct psychology, radical constructivism, and social constructionism: A dialogue (2014). Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 27, 1-13. PCT, PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS Butt, T. (1998). Sociality, role, and embodiment. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 11, 105-116. Butt, T. (1998). Sedimentation and elaborative choice. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 11, 265-281. Butt, T. (2004). Understanding, explanation, and personal constructs. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 1, 21-27. ☟ Armezzani, M., & Chiari, G. (2014). Ideas for a phenomenological interpretation and elaboration of personal construct theory. Part 1. Kelly between constructivism and phenomenology. Costruttivismi, 1, 136-149. ☟

Butt, T. (2006). Personal construct therapy and its history in pragmatism. In P. Caputi, H. Foster & L. L. Viney (Eds.), Personal construct psychology: New ideas (pp. 2034). London: Wiley. Procter, H. (2011). The roots of Kellian notions in philosophy: The categorial philosophers – Kant, Hegel and Peirce. ☟ Procter, H. (2014). Peirce's contributions to constructivism and personal construct psychology: I. Philosophical aspects. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 11, 6-33. ☟ Procter, H. (2016). Peirce's contributions to constructivism and personal construct psychology: II. Science, logic and inquiry. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 13, 210265. ☟ PCT AND HUMANISTIC-EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGIES Holland, R. (1970). George Kelly: Constructive innocent and reluctant existentialist. In D. Bannister (Ed.), Perspectives in personal construct theory (pp. 111-132). London: Academic Press. Soffer, J. (1990). George Kelly versus the existentialists: Theoretical and therapeutic implications. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 3, 357-376. Epting, F. R., & Leitner, L. M. (1992). Humanistic psychology and personal construct theory. Humanistic Psychologist, 20, 243-259. Benjafield, J. G. (2008). George Kelly: Cognitive psychologist, humanistic psychologist, or something else entirely? History of Psychology, 11, 239-262. PCT AND FAMILY SYSTEMIC APPROACHES

Armezzani, M., & Chiari, G. (2014). Ideas for a phenomenological interpretation and elaboration of personal construct theory. Part 2. Husserl and Kelly: A case of commonality. Costruttivismi, 1, 168-185. ☟

Feixas, G. (1990). Personal construct theory and the systemic therapies: Parallel orconvergent trends? Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 16, 1-20.

Armezzani, M., & Chiari, G. (2015). Ideas for a phenomenological interpretation and elaboration of personal construct theory. Part 3. Clinic, psychotherapy, research. Costruttivismi, 2, 58-77. ☟

Feixas, G., Procter, H. G., & Neimeyer, G. (1992). Convergent lines of assessment: Systemic and constructivist contributions. In Neimeyer, G. (Ed.), Casebook of constructivist assessment. New York: Sage. Procter, H. G., & Ugazio, V. (2017). Family constructs and semantic polarities: A convergent perspective? In D. Winter, P. Cummins, H. G. Procter & N. Reed (Eds.), Personal construct psychology at 60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

37

PCT AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

PCT AND OTHER TRENDS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

Soldz, S. (1988). Constructivist tendencies in recent psychoanalysis. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 329-347.

Warren, W. G. (1989). Personal construct theory and general trends in contemporary philosophy. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 2, 287-300.

Delmonte, M. (1990). George Kelly's personal construct theory: Some comparisons with Freudian theory. Psychologia: An international journal of psychology in the Orient, 33, 73-83.

Warren, B. (1998). Philosophical dimensions of personal construct psychology. London: Routledge.

Warren, B. (1990). Psychoanalysis and personal construct theory: An exploration. Journal of Psychology, 124, 449-463. Soldz, S. (1996). Psychoanalysis and constructivism: Convergence in meaningmaking perspectives. In K. T. Kuehlwein & H. Rosen (Eds.), Constructing realities: Meaning-making perspectives for psychotherapists (pp. 277-306). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. PCT AND NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY Mair, J. M. M. (1988). Psychology as storytelling. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 125-137. Mair, M. (1989). Kelly, Bannister, and a story-telling psychology. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 2, 1-14.

Brennan, J. (1999). Picture this: Wittgenstein and personal construct theory. In C. Mace (Ed.), Heart and soul: The therapeutic face of philosophy (pp. 67-83). Florence, KY: Taylor & Frances/Routledge. Butt, T. (2008). George Kelly: The psychology of personal constructs. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chiari, G., & Nuzzo, M. L. (2010). Constructivist psychotherapy: A narrative hermeneutic approach. London: Routledge. Butt, T., & Warren, B. (2016). Personal construct theory and philosophy. In D. A. Winter & N. Reed (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of personal construct psychology (pp. 1123). London: Wiley. Warren, B. (2016). Philosophy and psychology: The distinctiveness of the theory of personal constructs. In D. A. Winter & N. Reed (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of personal construct psychology (pp. 45-56). London: Wiley.

Mair, J. M. M. (1990). Telling psychological tales. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 3, 121-135. Botella, L., Corbella, S., Gómez, T., Herrero, O., & Pacheco, M. (2005). A personal construct approach to narrative and post-modern therapies. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (Eds.), Personal construct psychotherapy: Advances in theory, practice and research (pp. 69-80). London: Whurr. PCT AND BUDDHISM McWilliams, S. A. (1984). Construing and Buddhist psychology. Constructs, 3(1), 12. Kenny, V., & Delmonte, M. (1986). Meditation as viewed through personal construct theory. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 16, 1, 4-22. Thirakoul, P. P. (1996/97). Buddhist meditation and personal construct psychology. Website Serendip Studio. ☟ McWilliams, S. A. (2016). Personal construct psychology and buddhism. In D. A. Winter & N. Reed (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of personal construct psychology (pp. 439451). London: Wiley.

38

C HAPTER 5

The Writings of G. A. Kelly

The Centre for Personal Construct Psychology's first premises in 132 Warwick Way, Pimlico, London. From http://www.centrepcp.co.uk/history.htm

This chapter lists all the known works of Kelly, published and unpublished, sorted according to the year of their writing or publication. Compared to other bibliographies of Kelly’s writings, the following includes many amendments and integrations. DOI links are also added, when available. The vast majority of Kelly’s writings were collected by Fay Fransella thanks to the courtesy of Kelly’s wife, Gladys Thompson Kelly, and kept at the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology in London, established in 1981. In 2005 the Centre became part of the School of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK (N. Reed Director, D. Winter Consultant), and the writings are housed as The Fay Fransella and Miller Mair Collections of PCP Books, Papers and Dissertations in a special room in the University’s Learning Resources Centre.

The launch of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology in London, 1981. From left to right: Gavin Dunnett, Cassie Cooper, Peggy Dalton, Fay Fransella, Don Bannister and Helen Jones. From http://www.centrepcp.co.uk/history.htm

Education Period 1924 The sincere motive.

The drawings in this chapter were prepared by Kelly and were to illustrate Understandable Psychology, which was never published. It is a predominantly psychophysiological book written for a lay public. The drawings were published in the newsletter Constructs, 1982, Vol. 1, N. 4, and 1989, Vol. 7, N. 1.

Messenger of Peace, 49, 76-80.

1925 Forgotten issues. Friends University, Wichita, KS.

1926 The call to arms. Unpublished novel.

1927 A plan for socializing Friends University with respect to student participation in school control. University of Kansas, Wichita, KS.

1928 One thousand workers and their leisure. Unpublished Master thesis, University of Kansas, Wichita, KS.

1929 Fuselage stress analysis and design specifications for Skylark Model I. Report to the U. S. Bureau of Aeronautics in support of an application for a manufacturing license for the Watkins Aircraft Co., Wichita, KS. Onta Poem (between 1929 and 1945).

Transcribed in F. Fransella, George Kelly. London, Sage, 1955 (pp. 46-48).

40

1930

1936

Social inheritance.

Handbook of clinic practice.

University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Published in P. Stringer & D. Bannister (Eds.), Constructs of sociality and individuality (pp. 4-17). London: Academic Press, 1979.

Prediction of teaching success. Unpublished B. Ed. thesis, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

1931 Common factors in reading and speech disabilities. Unpublished PhD dissertation, State University of Iowa.

Fort Hays Kansas State College Period 1932

Unpublished manuscript, Fort Hays Kansas State College.

1937 (January). Report to the president of Fort Hays Kansas State College concerning psychological clinical services. Fort Hays Kansas State College. Stories from the psychology clinic.

Psychological Monographs, 43, 175-201. [DOI: 10.1037/h0093288]

The Aerend: A Kansas Quarterly (Fort Hays Kansas State College), 1937, 8(1), 57-61.

Understandable psychology.

The psychological clinic's use of practical rather than ideal recommendations.

Some common factors in reading and speech disabilities.

Unpublished manuscript, Fort Hays Kansas State College.

Proceedings of the 45th annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 1-4, 1937.

1933

Psychological Bulletin, 1937, 34(9), 746 [Abstract] [DOI: 10.1037/h0060801]

Some observations on the relation of cerebral dominance to the perception of symbols.

1938

Psychological Bulletin, 1933, 30(8), 583-584. [Abstract] [DOI: 10.1037/h0068157]

The practical effectiveness of certain general types of recommendations made by a psychological clinic.

1935

Journal of General Psychology, 1938, 19(1), 211-217.
 [DOI: 10.1080/00221309.1938.9711197]

Some observations on the relation of the principle of physiological polarity and symmetry and the doctrine of cerebral dominance to the perception of symbols.

Outline for the study of a child.

Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1935, 18, 202-213. [DOI: 10.1037/h0057172]

Fort Hays Kansas State College.

Differential diagnosis in the psychological clinic.

A method of diagnosing personality in the psychological clinic.

Psychological Bulletin, 1935, 32(9), 684-685. [Abstract] [DOI: 10.1037/h0052493]

The Psychological Record, 1938, 2(3), 95-111.

____, & Warnock, W. G., Inductive trigonometry.

The assumption of an originally homogeneous universe and some of its statistical implications.

Unpublished textbook, workbook, diagnostic tests, & remedial exercises in trigonometry.

Journal of Psychology, 1938, 5(1), 201-208. [DOI: 10.1080/00223980.1938.9917563]

41

The place of the psychologist in the small school system. Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Sciences, 1938, 48, 183. [Abstract] The person as a laboratory subject, as a statistical case, and as a clinical client. Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Sciences, 1938, 48, 186. [Abstract]

1939 (May 4). Clinic ranks high in speech department. State College Leader, 1939, 4.

1940 Observations made in a search for dynamic and accessible factors in intellectual development. Fort Hays Kansas State College, Studies in Clinical Psychology, 1940, 1, 5-10. Some practical considerations in the formulation of clinical recommendations. Psychological Bulletin, 1940, 37(8), 576. [Abstract] [DOI: 10.1037/h0057904]

1941 Hemphill, J. K., & ____, A comprehensive plan for case summaries. Psychological Bulletin, 1941, 38(7), 715. [Abstract] [DOI: 10.1037/h0050099]

Handbook of psychological clinic procedure. Fort Hays Kansas State College. Outline for a clinical case study. Fort Hays Kansas State College.

1942 ____, & Robinson, A. J., A further validation of role therapy. Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, St. Louis, May 1-2, 1942. Psychological Bulletin, 1942, 39(8), 596. [Abstract] [DOI: 10.1037/h0056662]

Bishop, F., & ____, A projective method of personality investigation. Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, St. Louis, May 1-2, 1942. Psychological Bulletin, 1942, 39(8), 599 [Abstract] [DOI: 10.1037/h0056662]

World War II And University Of
 Maryland Period 1944 Problems in the aviation training of British Royal Navy Cadets. Report to U. S. Navy.

1945 ____, & al., Attrition in U. S. Naval Aviation. ____, & al., War weariness in U. S. Naval Aviation. Design of the critical difference computer. Design computations and specifications for an analog computer. Special Devices Division, Bureau of Aeronautics, U. S. Navy. Perceptual integration in the design of aircraft instrument panels. Report to Aviation Psychology Branch, Division of Aviation Medicine, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, U. S. Navy. New methods in applied psychology. Proceedings of the Maryland Conference on Military Contributions to Methodology in Applied Psychology held at the University of Maryland, November 27-28, 1945, under the auspices of the Military Division of the American Psychological Association. New methods in applied psychology (Kelly G. A. editor). Report of the 1945 Conference on Military Psychology. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 1947.

42

1946 Standardization of techniques in clinical psychology. Unpublished manuscript, University of Maryland.

1947 The aims of the Maryland Conference. In G. A. Kelly (Ed.), New methods in applied psychology. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 1947.

Ohio State University Period 1948 Practice in interdisciplinary collaboration. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University.

Single level versus legislation for different levels of psychological training and experience. American Psychologist, 1950, 5(4), 109, 111. [DOI: 10.1037/h0063664]

1951 Psychological approaches to the management of patients. Unpublished address, Houston, TX, U. S. Veterans Administration Hospital. The psychology of personal constructs. Unpublished address, Houston, TX, U. S. Veterans Administration Hospital. The psychological construction of life. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University.

1950 A student's outline of graduate training in clinical psychology at Ohio State University. Ohio State University.

Training for professional function in clinical psychology: 2. Principles of training in clinical psychology. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1951, 21(2), 312-318.
 [DOI: 10.111/j.1939-0025.1951.tb06105.x]

Problems of mental health.

1952

Address.


Alternatives.

In Role of education in American life: A College of Education Conference in Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Ohio State University, April 20 and 21, University Hall Chapel (pp. 84-91). Columbus, OH: College of Education, Ohio State University.

Unpublished address, Purdue University. Theoretical behavior.

The organization of an agency. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University. The place of psychology in Southern Illinois University.

Unpublished address, Purdue University. Requirements of training and competence for psychological participation in rehabilitation.

Unpublished report to the President, Southern Illinois University.

Unpublished address, Milwaukee Conference on Rehabilitation.

____, & Moore, B. V., Report of survey of psychology at the University of Louisville.

1953 A plan for a comprehensive experimental study of the uses of television in teacher education. Annual reports, 1953-1954, New Jersey State Teachers College at Montclair.

43

A preliminary inquiry leading to a plan for a comprehensive experimental study of the uses of television in teacher education. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University.

Knowledge: Discovery or invention? Unpublished fragment, Louisville VA Hospital.

Contributions of learning theory to psychopathology.

1955

Unpublished paper, Midwestern Psychological Association.

I itch too: A comment.

A student's outline of graduate training in clinical psychology in the Ohio State University. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University.

American Psychologist, 1955, 10(4), 172-173. [DOI: 10.1037/h0047401] Television at the classroom door. Unpublished manuscript.

Where do little hypotheses come from?

Television and the teacher.

Paper presented at the Midwestern Psychological Association symposium, The role of theory in training clinical psychologists.

Emerging concepts that affect interprofessional alignments in psychology.

Published in Constructs (The Newsletter of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology), 1985, 3(4), 3-5

1954 Collet, G. M., & ____, Clinical validity and conceptual consistency. Unpublished manuscript. Collet, G. M., & ____, Prediction and communication problems illustrated with the Rorschach test.

American Psychologist, 1955, 10(10), 590-592. [DOI: 10.1037/h0044033]

Discussion of the findings of the Psychology Commission. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1955, 63, 359-364.
 [DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1955.tb36591.x] The psychology of personal constructs. (Vols. 2) New York: Norton. Vol. 1: A theory of personality; Vol. 2: Clinical diagnosis and psychotherapy. Reprinted by Routledge, London and New York, 1991, in association with the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology, London. Paperback edition: A theory of personality: The psychology of personal constructs. New York: Norton, 1963 [The first three chapters of Kelly's two-volume work, with a new introduction by the author. Chapter 3, § 23 (Conclusion), includes a paragraph not present in the original edition] Spanish trans.: Teoría de la personalidad: La psicología de las construcciones personales. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Troquel, 1966. German trans.: Die Psychologie der persönlichen Konstrukte. Paderborn: Junfermann, 1986. Italian trans.: [some chapters from Vol. 1] La psicologia dei costrutti personali. Teoria e personalità. Milano: Cortina, 2004.

Unpublished manuscript.

(September 1). Interdisciplinary collaboration.

Conrad, L. H., & ____, Television in a time of educational crises.

Presidential address at Division 13 (Consulting Division), American Psychological Association, San Francisco, CA.

Unpublished book.

Published in Newsletter of Division, 1955, 13

____, & Conrad, L. H., Report on classroom television.

(November 19). Next steps for the profession of psychology.

Unpublished manuscript.

Address, Ohio Psychological Association.

Howard, A. R., & ____, A theoretical approach to psychological movement.

1956

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1954, 49(3), 399-404.
 [DOI: 10.1037/h0061850]

Rep and Res Tests. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University.

44

Doctoral training in psychology in Southern Illinois University.

Some preliminary thoughts on what one should seek first.

Report to the President, Southern Illinois University.

Unpublished manuscript.

Issues: Hidden or mislaid.

Problems of clinical psychology in an industrial setting.

American Psychologist, 1956, 11(2), 112-113. [DOI: 10.1037/h0045993]

Paper presented at the Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.

1957 Cry of an exasperated crusader. Review of Mike Gorman, Every other bed. Cleveland: World Pub. Co.

Prediction and control.

Contemporary Psychology, 1957, 2, 47.

Unpublished manuscript.

The clinical psychologist as navigator.

Te a c h e r- s t u d e n t r e l ations at the university level.

Review of William Alvin Hunt, The clinical psychologist. Springfield, IL, Thomas.

Contemporary Psychology, 1957, 2, 183-184. Man's construction of his alternatives.

Paper presented at a conference sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Syracuse University, Spring 1957. Published in G. Lindzey (Ed.), Assessment of human motives (pp. 33-64). New York: Rinehart, 1958. Reprinted in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 66-93). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Hostility. Presidential address, Clinical Division, American Psychological Association, New York City. Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 267-280). New York: Wiley, 1969.

1958 The theory and technique of assessment.

Unpublished manuscript. Spanish trans.: Las relaciones entre el profesor y el estudiante en el nivel universitario. Revista de la Facultad de Estudios Generales, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1959, 2(3-6), 18-19.

Is treatment a good idea? Address to a Conference on Treatment, U. S. Veterans Administration Hospital, Sheridan, WY, 1958. Published in A. R. Howard (Ed.), Therapeutic roles in patient treatment (pp. 20-25). Sheridan, WY: Veterans Administration Hospital, 1959. Republished in Constructs (The Newsletter of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology), 1983, 2(2), 13. Republished in F. Fransella (Ed.), International handbook of personal construct psychology (pp. 233-236). Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2003.

Annual Review of Psychology, 1958, 9, 323-352.
 [DOI: 10.1146/annurev.ps.09.020158.001543]

1959

Personal construct theory and the psychotherapeutic interview.

A post-doctoral Institute on Verbal communication in psychotherapy, Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychologists in Private Practice (A Division of the South California Psychological Association) and the Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Ohio State University.

Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 224-264). New York: Wiley, 1969. Reprinted in Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1977, 1(4), 355-362. [DOI: 10.1007/BF01663999]

Outline of psychopathology. Ohio State University. [Writing completed in 1953]

(January 17-18). The function of interpretation in psychotherapy.

Feelings for and feelings of (The ontology of feeling). Ohio State University. Published in Constructs (The Newsletter of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology), 1983, 2(1), 3.

45

Values, knowledge and social control.

Don Juan.

Unpublished manuscript prepared for a symposium of the American Psychological Association, Cincinnati (read by E. L. Kelly in view of the author's illness).

Ohio State University.

Ohio State University. [Writing completed in 1953]

Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 333-351). New York: Wiley, 1969.

1960

1961

Review of Mental health and human relations in education by L. Kaplan.

(April 10). A mathematical approach to psychology.

Outline of psychotherapy.

Education Research Bulletin (Ohio State University), 1960, 39, 76. (May 6). Personal construct theory as a line of inference. Lecture presented at Harvard University. Published in Pakistan Journal of Psychology, 1964, 1, 80-93.

Confusion and the clock. Ohio State University. Published in F. Fransella (Ed.), Personal construct psychology 1977 (pp. 209-232). London: Academic Press, 1978. Italian trans.: La confusione e l'orologio. Costruttivismi, 2015, 2, 20-37.

Lecture to Moscow Psychological Society (U.S.S.R.), Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, Moscow. Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 94-113). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Suicide: The personal construct point of view. In N. L. Farberow & E. S. Schneidman (Eds.), The cry for help (pp. 255-280). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. The abstraction of human processes. Paper presented at the 14th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Christiansborg Castle, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 13-19, 1961. In G. S. Nielsen & S. Coopersmith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Vol. 2: Personality Research (pp. 220-229). Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1962.

1962 A further explanation of the factor analysis of repertory grids. Ohio State University. Sin and psychotherapy. Paper presented at the Temple University symposium on psychotherapy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 9, 1962. Published in O. H. Mowrer (Ed.), Morality and mental health (pp. 365-381). Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966. Published in W. Edgar Vinacke (Ed.), Readings in general psychology (pp. 123-139). American Book Co., 1968. Reprinted in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 165-188). New York: Wiley, 1969.

46

Europe's matrix of decision. Paper presented at the 10th annual Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Spring 1962. In M. R. Jones (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation 1962 (pp. 83-123). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.

Muddles, myths and medicine. Review of Thomas S. Szasz, The myth of mental illness: Foundations of a theory of personal conduct. New York: Harper & Row.

Contemporary Psychology, 1962, 7, 363-365. Aldous, the personable computer. Discussion at a conference on Computer simulation of personality: Frontier of psychological theory held at Educational Testing Service and Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 13-15 June, 1962.

The autobiography of a theory. Ohio State University. Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 46-65). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Clinical psychology at the Ohio State University: A critical appraisal. Unpublished manuscript.

In S. S. Tomkins & S. Messick (Eds.), Computer simulation of personality: Frontier of psychological theory (pp. 221-229). New York: Wiley, 1963.

Nonparametric factor analysis of personality theories.

(March 22). A doctoral program in clinical psychology.

Journal of Individual Psychology, 1963, 19(2), 115-147.

Report to the Department of Psychology, City College of New York. (May 13). Innovations in psychotherapy. Contribution to the Symposium on Innovations in Clinical Psychology, New York State Psychological Association Meetings. (December 7). In whom confide: On whom depend for what? 4th Annual Samuel H. Flowerman Memorial Lecture presented to the New York Society of Clinical Psychologists.

Reprinted in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 301-332). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Nursery rhymes for older tots. Ohio State University.

Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 189-206). New York: Wiley, 1969.

1964

1963

Chairman's report of findings of Evaluation Board appointed by U. S. Air Force.

The psychology of the unknown.

The language of hypothesis: Man's psychological instrument.

Ohio State University.

Address at the American Society of Adlerian Psychology and the Alfred Adler Institute graduation exercises, New York, May 16th, 1964. Published in Journal of Individual Psychology, 1964, 20(2), 137-152.

Published in D. Bannister (Ed.), New perspectives in personal construct theory (pp. 1-19). London: Academic Press, 1977.

Look who's talking. Review of Eric Berne, Transactional analysis in psychotherapy: A systematic individual and social psychiatry. New York: Grove.

Contemporary Psychology, 1963, 8, 189-190. Psychotherapy and the nature of man. Prepared for the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 207-215). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Evaluation of U. S. Air Force Retraining Program.

Reprinted in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 147-162). New York: Wiley, 1969. Italian trans.: Il linguaggio dell'ipotesi: lo strumento psicologico dell'uomo. Costruttivismi, 2014, 1, 16-27.

(May). Personal construct theory: A bibliography. Ohio State University. (September 2). Training for professional obsolescence. Paper presented at the Conference of Chief State Psychologists.

47

The strategy of psychological research.

Epilogue: Moments I remember.

Paper presented at Brunel College, London, on November 18, 1964 in a seminar series on personal construct theory conducted by Neil Warren, and published in The Theory and Methodology of George Kelly: A Report of the Proceedings of a Symposium on Construct Theory and Repertory Grid Methodology.

1965 Chicago Conference on the Professional Preparation of Clinical Psychologists.

Published in Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 1965, 18, 1-15. Reprinted in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 114-132). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Cook, S. W., Bibace, R., Garfield, S., ____, & Wexler, M., Issues in the professional training of clinical psychologists.

The threat of aggression. Paper presented at a Conference on Humanistic Psychology, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, November 27-29, 1964.

In E. L. Hoch, A. O. Ross & C. L. Winder (Eds.), Professional preparation of clinical psychologists (pp. 97-99). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1966.

Proceedings of the Conference on the Professional Preparation of Clinical Psychologists met in Chicago from August 27 to September 1, 1965. In E. L. Hoch, A. O. Ross & C. L. Winder (Eds.), Professional preparation of clinical psychologists (pp. 29-36). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1966.

Published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1965, 5, 195-201.
 [DOI: 10.1177/002216786500500208] Reprinted in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 281-288). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Brandeis University Period

1965

1966

Needs and uses of space in clinical psychology.

A brief introduction to personal construct theory.

Unpublished manuscript. Space needs for clinical psychology, 1965-1975. Unpublished manuscript. Progress report: Ohio State University's graduate program in clinical psychology. Unpublished manuscript. The psychotherapeutic relationship. Paper presented at a symposium on Cognitive and analytic conceptions of the therapeutic relationship. University of Houston, Texas, May 19, 1965. Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 216-223). New York: Wiley.

(May). Personal construct theory: A bibliography. Ohio State University. The role of classification in personality theory. Proceedings of the Conference on The Role and Methodology of Classification in Psychiatry and Psychopathology held in Washington, DC, November 1965. Published in Katz, M. M., Cole, J. O., & W. E. Barton (Ed.), The role and methodology of classification in psychiatry and psychopathology (pp. 155-162). Washington, DC: Public Health Service Publication, 1968. Reprinted in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 289-300). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Waltham, MA: Brandeis University. Published in J. C. Mancuso (Ed.), Readings for a cognitive theory of personality (pp. 27-58), Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York 1970, with the title “A summary statement of a cognitively-oriented comprehensive theory of behavior”. Published in D. Bannister (Ed.), Perspectives in personal construct theory (pp. 1-29), Academic Press, London 1970. Published in F. Fransella (Ed.), International handbook of personal construct psychology (pp. 3-20), Wiley, Chichester 2003. [The heading “Scientific behaviour as a paradigm of human behaviour”, present in Bannister’s publication, here is missing]

Ontological acceleration. Brandeis University. Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 7-45). New York: Wiley, 1969.

Humanistic methodology in psychological research. Brandeis University. Published in B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 133-146). New York: Wiley, 1969. Also in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1969, 9(1), 53-65.
 [DOI:

48

10.1177/002216786900900103]

1973

A brief autobiographical sketch.

Fixed role therapy.

Unpublished manuscript.

Centre for Personal Construct Psychology, University of Hertfordshire.

Clinical psychology afoot and abroad.

In R.-R. M. Jurjevich (Ed.), Direct psychotherapy: 28 American originals (pp. 394-422). Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973. Reprinted in J. E. Groves (Ed.), Essential papers on short-term dynamic therapy (pp. 202-229). New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Review of H. David (Ed.), International resources in clinical psychology. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Contemporary Psychology, 1966, 11, 20, 22. (April 3-7). Behavior is a question. Unpublished manuscript.

Prepared for presentation at the Xth Inter-American Congress of Psychology, Lima, Peru. Not delivered because of illness.

(September 4). Behaviour is an experiment. Invited address, Division of School Psychology, American Psychological Association. Published in D. Bannister (Ed.), Perspectives in personal construct theory (pp. 255-269). London: Academic Press, 1970.

(December). Personal construct theory: A bibliography. Brandeis University. Experimental dependency. Brandeis University.

1967 A psychology of the optimal man. In A. R. Maher (Ed.), The goals of psychotherapy (pp. 238-258). New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1967. Reprinted in A. W. Landfield, & L. M. Leitner (Eds.), Personal construct psychology: Psychotherapy and personality (pp. 18-35). New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1980.

Posthumous Writings

The complete list of The Writings of George A. Kelly (1905-1967) in APA style can be downloaded by clicking on this DOI

1969 Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly. B. Maher (Ed.), New York: Wiley. Reprinted: Huntington, NY: Krieger, 1979.

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C HAPTER 6

Personal Construct Psychology and Psychotherapy in the World

Sixty years after its birth, personal construct theory still represents an heterodoxy in psychology. Notwithstanding the recent spreading of psychological constructivism and constructivist psychotherapeutic approaches, PCT – with its application to the several fields of psychology and to psychotherapy – keeps its revolutionary flavour. Its peculiarity makes of PCT a community with its own literature, journals, congresses, organisations, and web resources.

L ITERATURE

I NTERNATIONAL C ONGRESSES

The ever growing number of journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers and dissertations makes the collection of references particularly useful for PCP researchers and practitioners.

In 1974 Al Landfield was asked to organise a Nebraska Symposium devoted to PCP. The Nebraska Symposiums on Motivation have been organised yearly by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln since 1953. As told in Section 3, Kelly was invited as a speaker in the 1962 symposium.

It was Kelly himself who started the practice in 1964 by drawing up a bibliography, then updated in 1965 and 1966. Besides, Kelly gradually evolved a mailing roster, dubbed the “Magpie List,” consisting of persons to whom he periodically mailed manuscripts and items of interest pertaining to his work. As of July 2nd, 1964, a list with sixty-two members was founded. It quickly expanded, doubling in size over the next three years. [N1985:89] After Kelly’s death in 1967, Alvin W. Landfield, one of his earliest students, came up with the idea of starting a Clearing House, a Library, where references would be sent. Once he obtained the Magpie List from Mrs. Gladys Kelly, Landfield started to send the references to the Members of the Clearing House at the end of each year. Following the first International Conference in 1975, the Clearing House annual letter was used also to announce the site of the next International Congress. Within several years, the list had expanded to about two hundred, representing twenty-four countries. [L2011:15]

Landfield planned to hold the International Conference in the fall semester of 1975. Invited speakers were some of the most prominent people writing on PCP during that period: Don Bannister, England; Miller Mair, Scotland; Han Bonarius, the Netherlands; Jim Mancuso, SUNY at Albany; Seymour Rosenberg, Rutgers University; Landfield himself, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Theodore Sarbin, University of California (not committed to PCP, but a friend of Jim Mancuso). Sarbin read the opening lecture. The Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1976 was later known as the First International Congress on PCP.

I too in 1990, enabled by an Apple II personal computer, drew up a list of References in Personal Construct Psychology & Psychotherapy. The list, unpublished but available upon request, includes about 1700 published and 140 unpublished works. An updated edition in 1996, Personal construct psychology & psychotherapy: A bibliography, reports about 2200 published and 300 unpublished works. It is still available online at the Oikos website. Beverly M. Walker, an important member of the Australasian Kellian community, offered to spread the above bibliography via the internet, so that a larger number of people interested in PCP can easily consult it and contribute with the report of new references. The PCP Reference Database has been hosted by the Personal Construct Group at the website of the University of Wollongong, Australia, but it is no longer working. Harry Procter continues to add to a list of PCP references to children and education originally compiled by Fay Fransella. From left: Seymour Rosenberg, Alvin W. Landfield, Don Bannister, James C. Mancuso, Han Bonarius, and Miller Mair, the speakers at the Nebraska Symposium 1976 on PCP. By permission of the Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

51

Since then, an International Congress on PCP has been organised every two years.

1st

Lincoln, NE, USA

1975

12th

Seattle, WA, USA

1997

2nd

Oxford, UK

1977

13th

Berlin, Germany

1999

3rd

Breukelen, Holland

1979

14th

Wollongong, Australia

2001

4th

St. Catherines, Canada

1981

15th

Huddersfield, UK

2003

5th

Boston, MA, USA

1983

16th

Columbus, OH, USA

2005

6th

Cambridge, UK

1985

17th

Brisbane, Australia

2007

7th

Memphis, TN, USA

1987

18th

Venice, Italy

2009

8th

Assisi, Italy

1989

19th

Boston, MA, USA

2011

9th

Albany, NY, USA

1991

20th

Sydney, Australia

2013

10th

Townsville, Australia

1993

21th

Hatfield, UK

2015

11th

Barcelona, Spain

1995

22nd Montreal, Canada

2017

C ONTINENTAL O RGANISATIONS

AND

C ONFERENCES

Following the spreading of PCP worldwide, three international organisations were founded in order to facilitate communication among members and the organisation of local conferences and international congresses.

The North American Personal Construct Network (NAPCN) was founded in 1984, and became the Constructivist Psychology Network (CPN) in 2004. CPN has published a newsletter, the Constructivist Chronicle, since 1997. The Constructivist Psychology Network organised the following biennial conferences starting from 1984:

1st

Cincinnati, OH, USA

1984

9th

New Paltz, NY, USA

2000

2nd

Banff, Canada

1986

10th

Vancouver, BC, Canada

2002

3rd

Lincoln, NE, USA

1988

11th

Memphis, TN, USA

2004

4th

San Antonio, TX, USA

1990

12th

San Marcos, CA, USA

2006

5th

Seattle, WA, USA

1992

13th

Victoria, BC, Canada

2008

6th

Indianapolis, IN, USA

1994

14th

Niagara Falls, NY, USA

2010

7th

Banff, Canada

1996

15th

Arlington, TX, USA

2012

8th

Denton, TX, USA

1998

16th

Vancouver, BC, Canada

2014

Photo G. Chiari

52

The Australasian Personal Construct Group (APCG) is closely related to the Personal Construct Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society. Its members live in Australia and New Zealand. The Group issues the APCG Newletter and has organised biennial conferences since 1983.

1st

Wollongong

1983

9th

Bendigo

2000

2nd

Perth

1984

10th

Sydney

2002

3rd

Melbourne

1986

11th

Melbourne

2004

4th

Wollongong

1988

12th

Wollongong

2006

5th

Adelaide

1990

13th

Melbourne

2008

6th

Sydney

1992

14th

Wollongong

2010

7th

Canberra

1996

15th

Hunter Valley

2012

8th

Brisbane

1998

16th

The European Personal Construct Association (EPCA) was created in 1990 and edited for some years its own Newsletter. The Association organised or sponsored the following biennial conferences: 1st

York, UK

1992

8th

Kristianstad, Sweden

2006

2nd

St. Andreasberg, Germ.

1994

9th

London, UK

2008

3rd

Reading, UK

1996

10th

Belgrade, Serbia

2010

4th

Chester, UK

1998

11th

Dublin, Ireland

2012

5th

Malta

2000

12th

Brno, Czech Republic

2014

6th

Firenze, Italy

2002

13th

Padua, Italy

2016

7th

Stuttgart, Germany

2004

14th

Edinburgh, Scotland

2018

U NIVERSITY O RGANISATIONS

AND

P RIVATE C ENTRES

U NITED S TATES In the USA, Canada, Israel and Australia, study, research and training centres began to take form in some Universities, some thanks to people who had studied with Kelly. Among them were some of the “Thursday Nighters”, who had attended the informal meetings in Kelly’s home, such as Al Landfield, Rue Cromwell, Franz Epting and Brendan Maher, who had a prominent role. Alvin W. Landfield, particularly interested in psychotherapy, formed PCT groups, first at the University of Missouri–Columbia (19561972) then at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Under his teaching, Nebraska graduated two students, Larry M. Leitner and Robert A. NeAlvin W. Landfield in 1975 imeyer. Both had been undergraduate students of Franz Epting in Larry M. Leitner Florida and were destined to give important contributions to PCT. Leitner will become professor of clinical psychology at Miami University, and Neimeyer, professor in the DepartRobert A. Neimeyer ment of Psychology at the University of Memphis and editor (with Greg. J. Neimeyer, of the Department of Psychology of the Franz R. Epting

53

University of Florida at Gainesville) of the International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, and then editor-in-chief of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology.

research program in social cognition and interpersonal communication.

Franz R. Epting moved from Ohio State to the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1967, where he established research programs in such areas as cognitive complexity, death and dying, and parent-child interaction, attracting many students. A graduate exchange program with the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands favoured the birth of a Dutch network, headed by Han Bonarius. Epting is the current President of the George Kelly Society.

The work of Spencer A. McWilliams, former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the California State University San Marcos, addresses several themes such as PCP, Zen meditation and Buddhist psychology in their relation with social constructionism and other postmodern pespec-

In the early 1950s, under Kelly’s supervision, Rue Cromwell wrote a thesis on conceptual clustering. While professor since 1972 and later chief of the Division of Psychiatry at the Rue Cromwell University of Rochester, his interest in grid technique produced, in collaboration with L. G. Space, sophisticated, computer-based, interactive programs for eliciting and analysing grids. Their collaboration with Peter Dingemans, from the University of James C. Mancuso (1928-2005) Utrecht, allowed i m p o r t a n t r esearch on the construing processes of schizophrenics.

Walter Crockett

Other US research groups were built by psychologists who never studied directly with Kelly but discovered PCT through their reading of his work. Among them is James C. Mancuso, who joined the State University of New York–Albany in 1961 showing a special interest in child development and parent training. Another is Walter Crockett, professor of social psychology at the University of Kansas since 1968, who developed a

Spencer A. McWilliams

tives.

The current President of the North American Constructivist Psychology Network, Kenneth W. SewKenneth W. Sewell ell, Kansas State University alumnus, is Vice President for Research at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. His research has focused on posttraumatic stress and bereavement. Professor of Psychology and Counseling at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Jonathan D. Raskin, managing editor of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology, studies psychology and counseling from a constructivist perspective – often Jonathan D. Raskin using George Kelly’s PCT and von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism –, but also incorporating aspects of social constructionism, narrative therapy, solution-focused therapy, and other constructivist approaches. He is also editor (with Sara K. Bridges) of the book series Studies in meaning.

54

U NITED K INGDOM The spreading of PCP in Europe is undoubtedly due to Don Bannister. He was born in 1928 in a mining village in Yorkshire, graduated in psychology at the University of Manchester in 1954, and completed his training as a clinical psychologist at the Maudsley Hospital. Bannister read Kelly’s two volumes in the library of the Institute of Psychiatry in London in 1957 and realised it was the only psychology that was about the individual person. In 1959 he wrote his thesis putting forward an hypothesis on schizophrenic thought disorder Don Bannister (1924-1986) based on PCT. He tested his hypothesis by working with people diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia while head of the department of Clinical Psychology at Bexley Hospital in Kent and, from the late 1970s until his death aged 62, at High Royds Hospital in his native Yorkshire.

ver, he edited several books on PCP and four novels which received a warm welcome from literary critics. An educational psychologist who adopted PCP from Bannister whilst a student at the University of London was Tom Ravenette. He adopted many techniques and probing questions to aid clinicians, teachers and others to understand how children and young people made sense of their worlds. Tom Ravenette (1924-2005) Ravenette’s work on the application of PCP to young people has been carried on by Richard J. Butler – who in turn undertook clinical practice at High Royds Hospital working alongside Bannister – and David Green, both of them practicing and teaching at the University of Leeds.

One of Bannister’s earliest associates was Phillida Salmon, who worked with him in Bexley Hospital since 1961. Even though she was an independent thinker, never an orthodox Kellian, she had been a central figure in the spreading of PCP in Europe. But beyond his scientific Phillida Salmon (1933-2005) contributions Bannister was a challenging and witty spreader of PCT, through his lectures and his writings. In 1968 he wrote The Evaluation of Personal Constructs with Miller Mair, his Scottish friend. In 1971 he joined Fay Fransella to write Inquiring Man, still the best introductory account of Kelly’s theory. In 1977, again with Fay Fransella, he wrote a manual of repertory grid techniques. Moreo-

Miller Mair was another prominent figure of the Kellian community. Director of psychological services and research at the Crichton Royal Hospital in the region of Dumfries and Galloway, he advocated PCP as a storytelling psychology, the latter being his way of thinking of the very discipline of psychology itself. Miller Mair (1937-2011)

It was under the super vision of Miller Mair at Crichton Royal that Peter Cummins first encountered PCP in action in 1974, before going to work at Bexley Hospital as the last person appointed by Don Bannister before Don moved to Yorkshire. Cummins stayed there until 1992, and then moved to the Coventry Primary Care Trust. His recent interest is in the treatment of anger.

Peter Cummins

55

fordshire at Hatfield, where all the activities were moved. The library now forms the basis of the Fransella and Miller Mair PCP Collections, held at the Univer-

The first private group organised around Kelly ’s ideas has probably been the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology founded by Fay Fransella in London in 1981 (see also Chapter 5). If it were

sity of Hertfordshire in its Learning Resource Centre at Hatfield.

Fay Fransella (1925-2011)

not for Don Bannister, many think that there would have been no Centre at all. The Centre offered workshops and distant learning courses on PCP for years, was accepted by the UK Council for Psychotherapy as an organisational member, published a quarterly newsletter, Con-

The Centre’s free newsletter is called The Constructivist Interventionist.

Peggy Dalton (1932-2012)

structs, up to 1989, and owned a collection of personal construct books, journals, and the vast majority of Kelly’s unpublished manuscripts. Peggy Dalton was one of the first students of the Centre. Coming from theater, she worked on stammering, in partnership with Fay Fransella. She wrote two introductory books on PCP, one with Fransella and one with Gavin Dunnett. By 2005, thanks to two prominent figures of the PCP community, Nick Reed and David A. Winter, the Centre found a new home at the School of Psychology of the University of Hert-

Nick Reed

Recently, Winter and Reed edited The Wiley handbook of personal construct psychology, which updates the state-of-the-art of PCP thirteen years after the International handbook of personal construct psychology edited by Fransella in 2003. Winter, in turn introduced to PCT thanks David A. Winter to a lecture of Don Bannister, was also the author in 1992 of Personal construct psychology in clinical practice, which extensively reviews the applications of PCT in the clinical field, and is associate editor of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology.

Harry Procter

A visiting professor of the same University of Hertfordshire at Hatfield is Harry Procter. Procter took a PhD at the University of Bristol in 1978 with a thesis on PCT and family, and since then has been working on the application of PCP to

56

children and families, on qualitative grids, and, more recently, on the affinities between pragmatism (mainly Peirce) and Kelly. Another important centre for the spreading of PCP in the UK is the University of Huddesfield. Here Trevor Butt taught, who approached PCP after having met Don Bannister, who later become a close friend and mentor. Butt was able to gain a PhD by publication, which was examined by Phillida Salmon in 1998. He extended the theoretical framework of Trevor W. Butt (1947-2015) PCT by elaborating some of its central features in the light of phenomenology and pragmatism. His collaboration with Vivien Burr, who joined the department at Huddesfield in 1983, produced many joint publications showing a social vision of PCP, also thanks to Burr’s familiarity with social Vivien Burr constructionism. Burr is also coeditor (with Jörn Scheer and in place of Butt) of the online journal Personal Construct Theory & Practice. The field of educational Maureen Pope psychology is especially thriving thanks to two psychologists who taught at the University of Reading and are now Emeritus Professors: Maureen Pope and Pam Denicolo. Their research on the application of PCP and constructivist research methods in education led to numerous books, chapters, journal articles and conference papers in these fields.

leadership development, and his interest in the process of personal transition in PCP terms. Fisher organized in 1998 the EPCA conference in Chester together with David Savage, Director of Applied Psychology , Physical Education & Sports Science Department at the University College of Chester and expert in sport psychology.

Mary Frances

M a r y Fr a n c e s , after a degree in John Fisher psychology at the University of London in 1985, obtained a diploma in Personal Construct Psychology at the Centre for PCP in 1990. She works with individuals, groups and organisations from a constructivist perspective, and her interests include collaborative working, alternative approaches to leadership, action research, storytelling and narrative, and many aspects of personal and professional change and transition.

Nelarine Cornelius is professor of organisation studies at the School of Business and Management of the Queen Mary University of London. Her areas of interest include identity management and social justice, and business research methods, including constructivist methods.

Nelarine Cornelius

Other local groups in the UK are the Coventry Constructivist Centre, and the York PCP Group headed by Helen Jones.

Pam Denicolo

The biography of John Fisher, from aircraft radars to simulation engineering, up to business psychology, explains his being an expert in change management and

57

C ANADA

A USTRALIA The Canadian contributions to PCT are primarily due to Jack R. Adams-Webber, who began his dissertation under Kelly’s supervision at Ohio State University in 1964, and accompanied him when he moved to Brandeis University in 1965. After Kelly’s death, Adams-Webber joined Don Bannister’s work on schizophrenia for two years, and lastly joined the psychology faculty at Brock University at St. Catharines in 1970.

Jack R. Adams-Webber

Another university centre in Canada is tied to the

names of Brian R. Gaines and Mildred L. G. Shaw who carry on a sophisticated research program on knowledge acquisition for expert systems based on personal construct technology at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Calgary. They developed WebGrid Plus, a free online service for the elicitation and analysis of repertory grids.

The spreading of PCT in Australia is mainly associated to the School of Psychology of the University of Wollongong. Here, Linda Viney had moved in 1980 with her enthusiasm for Kelly’s ideas embraced ten years before, and here, as departmental head, she set up a Personal Construct Research group in 1981, which met regularly for over 30 years. The group fostered the formation of the Australasian Personal Construct Group and the publication of its newsletter, and obtained the recognition of a Personal Construct Psychology Interest Group by the Australian Psychological Society. Beverly M. Walker

A prominent member of the Peter Caputi group is Beverly M. Walker, who wrote extensively in PCP giving fundamental contribution to the notion of dispersion of dependency and to the utilization of the dependency grid. She is also co-editor (with Jörn Scheer) of the Internet Encyc l o p a e d i a o f Pe r s o n a l Bill Warren Construct Psychology.

Mildred L. G. Shaw and Brian R. Gaines

I SRAEL Another psychologist who graduated with Kelly at Ohio State University in 1966 is Michaela Lifshitz. In 1973 she assumed faculty status at the University of Haifa, Israel, where she instituted a research program on psychosocial problems, interrupted by her early death in 1979. At the same university Devorah Kalekin-Fishman carries on for years the presence of PCT in Israel showing a special interest in the broad theme of human rights in late modernity. Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

Linda L. Viney (1942-2014)

Richard C. Bell

Another member of the group is Peter Caputi, mainly interested in organisational psychology according to a PCP approach.

58

Sean Brophy was a management consultant and author in private practice in Dublin, with experience in Ireland, the UK, the Middle East, the West Indies, and the United States.

The Australian PCP network is enriched by members working in other universities. Among them, Bill Warren, from the Faculty of Education of the University of Newcastle, mainly interested in the philosophical roots of PCT; and Richard C. Bell, from the Department of Psychology of the University of Melbourne, expert on the analysis of repertory grids and their computerized analysis.

I TALY

N ORWAY Also Norway has an authoritative representative of PCP in the person of Finn Tschudi, who spent his professional life in psychology at the University of Oslo. Tschudi introduced the ABC model, and is now actively involved in restorative justice.

Finn Tschudi

Again, it was Bannister who spread PCP in Italy, through the reading of Inquiring man first, and then through two invitations made by a group of Sean Brophy (1943-2017) former students of Vittorio Guidano. Since then, two members of that group, Maria Laura Nuzzo and Gabriele Chiari, applied themselves to the study, the pratice and the teaching of PCT and psychotherapy for all of their professional lives.

I RELAND

Bernadette O’Sullivan

for Psychotherapy.

Ireland too shows the presence of PCP, again through the teaching of Bannister and Fransella. It is with them that Bernadette O’Sullivan trained as a personal construct psychotherapist in London in the 1970s. Returned to Ireland she together with a group of colleagues founded in the mid-1980s the Vico Consultation Centre, a systemic constructivist psychotherapy practice, thus introducing PCP to Irish family therapy. Constructivist therapy is now one of the five sections recognized by the Irish Council

A great contribution to the spreading of PCP worldwide is given also by Vincent Kenny, as Director of the Institute of Constructivist Psychotherapy in Ireland, Director of Psychotherapy Training at the Department of Psychiatry, University College, Dublin, as editor of the website Towards an ecology of mind and member of the editorial board of Constructivist Foundations.

Maria Laura Nuzzo, Don Bannister and Gabriele Chiari in 1984

Vincent Kenny

After the first private courses, the Italian law on the regulation of psychological and psychotherapeutic activities came into force in 1993 allowed the ministerial recognition of private Schools of specialisation in psychotherapy and, among them, of the School of specialisation in Constructivist Psychotherapy of CESIPc in Florence. Since then, a course of specialisation in personal construct psychotherapy – and, later, in hermeneutic constructivist psychotherapy, the term given to our elaboration of it – has started each year in the seats of Florence and Padua headed by Nuzzo and myself and, after Nuzzo’s early death in 2005, by myself and our col-

59

Maria Laura Nuzzo (1946-2005)

nal Constructivisms.

Massimo Giliberto

therapist with UKCP.

laborators. In 1997, together with other colleagues of CESIPc, we founded the Italian Association of Constructivist Psychology and Psychotherapy (AIPPC), which edits the online jourGabriele Chiari

A former student of Chiari and Nuzzo, Massimo Giliberto, founded in 2004 in Padua the Institute of Constructivist Psychology, seat of another PCP-oriented School of Constructivist Psychotherapy recognised by the ministry of education. The Institute edits the Italian Journal of Constructivism, and is among the promoters of the European Constructivist Training Network (ECTN) together with the Serbian Constructivist Association, and joined by the British Personal Construct Psychology Association (PCPA) which in turn organizes its training in constructivist psychotherapy leading to the registration as a psycho-

An important contribution to the introduction of PCP at an academic level was given by Gabriele Chiari as lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Florence (2004-2011), and is still given by Carmen Dell’Aversano, of the English Maria Armezzani Department of

Carmen Dell’Aversano

the University of Pisa, a specialist in communication in the fields of literature, personal relationships and therapy, teacher in both the Schools of Florence and Padua; Maria Armezzani, associate professor at the Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology of the University of Padua, a phenomenologist interested in the affinities between PCT and phenomenology; Sabrina Cipolletta, Department of General Psychology of the University of Padua, researcher in health psychology. Both Armezzani and Cipolletta were trained in personal construct psychotherapy by Chiari and Nuzzo and are teachers of the School of specialisation in Constructivist Psychotherapy of CESIPc.

Sabrina Cipolletta

Due to its regulation for the training of psychotherapists and the presence of two Schools of specialisation, it is likely that Italy has the highest number of personal construct psychotherapists in the world.

G ERMANY Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Stuttgart, Martin Fromm is trained as a clinical psychologist and is the author of several publications about PCP and methodology. The contribution to PCP of Jörn W. Scheer, Emeritus Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Giessen, spreads far beyond the German border. Since the 1980s he has edited a number of books, is co-editor of the Internet Encyclopaedia of Personal Construct Psychology and of the online journal Personal Construct Theory & Practice, maintains The PCP Martin Fromm Gateway that includes the PCP NewsBlog, and recently has been the promoter of the foundation of the George Kelly Society, in which he occupies the position of Information Officer. Jörn W. Scheer

60

S PAIN Another European country with important contributors to PCP is Spain. One of them, Guillem Feixas Viaplana, is professor in the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Barcelona. He is especially interested in implicative dilemmas as revealed by the analysis of repertory grids, a project also carried on by the Group of Constructivist Psychotherapy at the University of Salamanca. The other, Luis Botella, is professor in the Faculty of Guillem Feixas Viaplana Psychology of the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona, and is interested in the integration between narrative and personal construct psychotherapy. Luis Botella

Gothenburgh teaches Britt-Marie Apelgren, whose primary research field concerns teachers' and students' perceptions and experiences of language teaching from a constructivist theoretical framework, primarily influenced by personal construct psychology.

Britt-Marie Apelgren

At Kristianstad University teaches Marie-Louise Österlind, a researcher in the field of education inspired by the theories of “the reflective practitioner”, personal construct psychology and phenomenology.

S ERBIA Also the above mentioned Serbian Constructivist Association, born in 1995, organizes courses in constructivist counseling and psychotherapy under the direction of Dušan Stojnov, professor at the Psychology Department of the University of Belgrade, thus contributing to the spreading of PCP in Serbia. At the University of Belgrade studied Jelena Pavlović, Director of the Koučing centar, who is one of the leaders of coaching psychology, in Serbia, according to a PCP approach.

Marie-Louise Österlind

The colleagues I chose to mention in the above survey represent only part of the worldwide community who have contributed and are still actively contributing to the spreading of PCP. They are all colleagues I have had the chance to know either personally or through their writings. I look forward to having the opportunity to meet many more in the near future.

Dušan Stojnov

S WEDEN At the Faculty of Education of the University of

Jelena Pavlović

61

J OURNALS Don Bannister was against the idea of a journal specifically devoted to PCP, afraid this could aggravate the condition of isolation which the Kellian community was suffering, given the radical peculiarity of its theory of reference. In Bannister’s opinion, it would have been better had PCPers published their papers in journals open to various approaches, so as to introduce a wider readership to Kelly’s ideas. Anyway, in 1988 the first issue of the International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology was published, initially by Hemisphere Publishing Corporation and afterwards by the Taylor and Francis group, edited by Robert A. Neimeyer and Greg J. Neimeyer. In 1994 the journal was renamed Journal of Constructivist Psychology to allow contributions from other constructivist perspectives. As stated in its aims and scope, “The Journal of Constructivist Psychology is the first publication to provide a professional forum for such diverse expressions of constructivism as personal construct theory, dialogical self theory, radical constructivism, social constructionism, narrative psychology, and postmodern psychology.”

death in 2015, Viv Burr succeeded as coeditor. Both the two Italian groups of PCP and personal construct psychotherapy have their own journal. The Institute of Constructivist Psychology in Padua edits since 2012 the six-monthly ejournal Rivista Italiana di Costruttivismo. The Managing Director is Massimo Giliberto, the Scientific Director Francesco Velicogna, the Executive Director Luca Pezzullo, the Editor-in-chief Chiara Centomo. A free registration is required to access the journal.The Associazione Italiana di Psicologia e Psicoterapia Costruttivista (AIPPC) edits since 2014 the six-monthly ejournal Construttivismi. The Editors-in-chief are Gabriele Chiari and Lorenzo Cionini (co-directors of the School of specialization in constructivist psychotherapy of CESIPc, with seats in Florence and Padua), and the Assistant Editor and Managing Editor is Clarice Ranfagni. The journal publishes articles on PCP and other constructivist approaches in Italian and English. A free registration is required to access the journal.

Currently, Robert A. Neimeyer is the Editorin-chief, Jonathan D. Raskin the Managing Editor, and David Winter the Associate Editor. In 2004 Jörn Scheer started the online journal Personal Construct Theory & Practice. This journal publishes papers on personal construct theory as well as its applications in a variety of disciplines, such as psychotherapy and counselling, education, and organisational behaviour. It also serves as a forum for practitioners in the various professions involved. Contributions to the journal are peer-reviewed and the access is free. For several years Trevor Butt has helped Scheer as co-editor of the journal. After Butt’s

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T HE G EORGE K ELLY S OCIETY The George Kelly Society (GKS) is a multidisciplinary professional society which supports the study of, and communication about, the life and work of George Alexander Kelly (1905-1967), the Psychology of Personal Constructs, and Kelly's ongoing influence in the many fields to which he contributed. It was founded in June, 2016. The focus of the organisation is the Psychology of Personal Constructs, its theoretic developments and practical applications, and its relationships to neighbouring fields. Membership is open to anyone interested in the life and work of George Kelly and the Psychology of Personal Constructs. Presently, there is no membership fee. To become a member, please send the Membership Application Form to the Secretary.

Steering Committee President: Prof. Franz Epting, Gainesville, Florida, USA
 Vice-President: Prof. David Winter, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK
 Secretary/Treasurer: Dr. Desley Hennessy, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
 Information Officer: Prof. Jörn Scheer, Hamburg, Germany
 Members-at-large:
 Dr.ssa Chiara Centomo, Padua, Italy
 Prof. Gabriele Chiari, Florence, Italy
 Peter Cummins, MA, Coventry, UK

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The Author GABRIELE CHIARI, MD chartered psychotherapist, is co-director and teacher at the School of Specialization in Constructivist Psychotherapy at CESIPc, Florence, Italy. He introduced personal construct theory in Italy in the early 80's and since then has trained about two hundred psychotherapists and contributed to the spreading of Kelly's ideas at an academic level. A member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology and Personal Construct Theory & Practice since their first issue, co-editor of the e-journal Costruttivismi, and member-at-large of the George Kelly Society, he has published extensively on constructivist epistemology, theory and practice. His latest book in English (together with the late Maria Laura Nuzzo) is Constructivist psychotherapy: A narrative hermeneutic approach, published by Routledge in 2010. www.gabrielechiari.it

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Acceptance A willingness to see the world through the other person's eyes. [K1955:373]

One might even say that the psychology of personal constructs is, among other things, a psychology of acceptance. [K1955:373] Acceptance does not mean seeking mere commonality of ideas between clinician and client, it means seeking a way of subsuming the construct system of the client. [K1955:374] Everyone ultimately seems to want acceptance from others, provided it can be an acceptance of the kind of self which is acceptable to oneself. [K1955:390] [Acceptance] involves not so much the approval of the client's view of himself as it does the readiness to utilize the client's modes of approach his system of axes, his reference points, his ways of approaching problems. The therapist attempts to employ the client's construct system, though not to be encapsulated by it. [K1955:587] [Acceptance is] a function of the clinician's conceptualization of his role rather than as a therapeutic technique. The accepting therapist tries earnestly to put himself in the client's shoes, but at the same time seeks to maintain a professional overview of the client's problems. This means that in accepting the client the therapist makes an effort to understand him in his the client's own terms, and that, also, he subsumes a major portion of the client's construction under his the therapist's own professional constructs. [K1955:649] Acceptance has been defined as the willingness to see the world through the client's eyes. It might be more precisely defined as the therapist's attempt to employ the client's own personal construct system. In terms of our Commonality Corollary, acceptance is the movement of the therapist's mental processes in the construed direction of commonality with the client’s construct system. [K1955:1049]

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Aggression see Aggressiveness

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Aggressiveness Aggressiveness is the active elaboration of one's perceptual field. [K1955:508]

There are some persons who are distinguished by their greater tendency to set up choice points in their lives and then to make their elaborative choices. They are always precipitating themselves and others into situations which require decision and action. We call them aggressive. Within the realm of the individual there are those areas in which he is likely to be more aggressive than in others. These are the areas in which the person "does things." Some psychologists might describe these areas as "interest areas." Within such areas the person appears to be neither shy nor lazy. He moves through them with initiative and relative freedom. [K1955:508-09] In the psychology of personal constructs we make a clear distinction between aggressiveness and hostility. A person is aggressive if he is active in formulating testable hypotheses and in trying them out to see what happens. If he insists on laying uncollectable wagers or if he procrastinates in looking for validational evidence, he is passive. Aggression may therefore be as much intellectual as motoric. [K1955:604] Aggression is often the most promising solution for hostility. The trick is to channelize the aggression. This means the development of appropriate two-ended constructs. The drastic alternatives which seem, under the client's system of constructs, to be the only other choices open to him must be replaced by reconstruing the situation in more discriminating terms. [K1955:875] Aggression may eventuate in guilt because it may lead to misadventures in elaborating one's role constructs. The novel role relations one aggressively seeks to establish may collapse. Aggression in the area of role relations may thus lead quite directly to guilt. [K1955:878]

Related Glossary Terms Guilt, Hostility, Transition

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Anticipation Anticipation is both the push and pull of the psychology of personal constructs. [K1955:49]

Anticipation is not merely carried on for its own sake; it is carried on so that future reality may be better represented. It is the future which tantalizes man, not the past. Always he reaches out to the future through the window of the present. [K1955:49] Since we have postulated that all human movement is based on anticipations, the choice of an alternative through which to move is itself a matter of what one anticipates. [K1955:66] Where Dewey would have said that we understand events through anticipating them, we would add that our lives are wholly oriented toward the anticipation of events. [K1955:157] If man is concerned primarily with the anticipation of events, we need no longer appeal to hedonism, or some disguised form of it, such as “satisfaction” or “reinforcement” to explain his behavior. [K1955:158]

Related Glossary Terms Choice Corollary, Experience Cycle, Fundamental Postulate, Range Corollary, Validation/ Invalidation

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Anxiety Anxiety is the recognition that the events with which one is confronted lie outside the range of convenience of one’s construct system. [K1955:495]

Of course, if events lay entirely outside the range of convenience of one's construct system he could not even perceive them, nor could he be specifically anxious about them. What happens is that the anxious person has found that he has partially lost his structural grip on events. He is caught in the confusion of anxiety. [K1955:495] People protect themselves against anxiety in various ways. One way is in a loosening of one's constructs. [...] Its protective effect can be seen in the thinking of certain schizophrenic clients. The conceptualization is so loosened that they seem to have a system that still covers everything. They are not caught short of constructs. But what constructs! [K1955:497] Sometimes one reveals the imminence of anxiety by exhibiting another kind of protective behavior. One may tighten his subordinate constructs and thus maintain a greater measure of organization at the lower levels of his system. He may become more meticulous about the little routines of living. A man whose home life is losing structure may spend more time at the office. He may work out his office routine in a highly structured manner. The effect of this type of protective step is usually to block the readjustive changes which might follow from being anxious for a while. He does not "face his problems"; hence he does not find new solutions for them. [K1955:498] From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs, anxiety, per se, is not to be classified as either good or bad. It represents the awareness that one's construction system does not apply to the events at hand. It is, therefore, a precondition for making revisions. [K1955:498] Anxiety is confusion in one's construction system. It ranges from the little momentary bafflements of everyday living to the "free-floating anxiety" which betrays a breakdown in superordinate structures. [K1955:508] A person caught in an anxiety situation may construe impulsively in order to bring some semblance of structure to bear upon his problems. [K1955:527]

Related Glossary Terms Transition

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

C-P-C Cycle The C-P-C Cycle is a sequence of construction involving, in succession, circumspection, preemption, and control, and leading to a choice which precipitates the person into a particular situation. [K1955:565]

The C-P-C Cycle (Circumspection-Preemption-Control Cycle) has to do with decision making in which the self is involved. [K1955:514] The C-P-C Cycle, then, starts with circumspection, which enables the person to look at his elements propositionally, or in a multidimensional manner. But because he cannot, to quote a classic phrase, "mount his horse and ride off in all directions," he must choose the most relevant axis along which to construe his situation. He therefore selects what he believes to be the crucial issue and temporarily or permanently disregards the relevancy of all the other issues that may be involved. Thus, by preemption, he sets up a choice point, a crossroads of decision. [...] But the C-P-C Cycle does not end with preemption. There is still the choice to be made. Indeed, the final "C" in our term might stand for choice as well as for control. As we have indicated before in our Choice Corollary, a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system. [K1955:516-17]

Related Glossary Terms Choice Corollary, Circumspection, Control, Impulsivity, Preemption, Propositional Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Choice Corollary A person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system. [K1955:64]

The Choice Corollary lays down the grounds upon which we can make some predictions regarding how people will act after they have construed the issues with which they are faced. [K1955:67] Under the Choice Corollary we are able to reconstrue some of the issues for which hedonism and motivational theory provide awkward answers. Stimulus-response theory requires some sorts of assumptions to explain why certain responses become linked to certain stimuli. In certain theoretical structures this is managed by some supplementary theorizing about the nature of motives or need satisfactions. But in our assumptive structure we do not specify, nor do we imply, that a person seeks "pleasure," that he has special "needs," that there are "rewards," or even that there are "satisfactions." In this sense, ours is not a commercial theory. To our way of thinking, there is a continuing movement toward the anticipation of events, rather than a series of barters for temporal satisfactions, and this movement is the essence of human life itself. [K1955:68] Our postulate and its corollaries do not say that a person always behaves in the manner in which outcomes are most predictable; rather, they say that a person extends and defines a system of processes in such a manner as to provide an ultimate way in which more events may be better predicted. He normally does not beat out a little circular path; he explores. He seeks the optimal anticipation of events. He works toward evolving a system. He does not necessarily seek merely those events which are already optimally anticipated. [K1955:523] According to our Choice Corollary, a person chooses for himself that alternative through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system. One may, therefore, select a part of the world about him and deal especially with it, rather than some other part, simply because he can. In other words, one tends to choose what events he will elaborate upon because they appear to be amenable to treatment. [K1955:735]

Related Glossary Terms Anticipation, C-P-C Cycle

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Circumspection A process of looking at a situation in a multidimensional manner. [K1955:516]

Circumspection is a way of considering additional constructions. “These are spades. Now what else may we say about them?” [K1955:520]

Related Glossary Terms C-P-C Cycle, Impulsivity, Propositional Construct

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Commonality Corollary To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to those of the other person. [K1955:90]

What we have said in our Commonality Corollary does not contradict what we have assumed in our Individuality Corollary. By using the term, to the extent, we indicate that we are designating a totality of aspects in which the two persons' constructions of experience may be construed as similar. That there will still be many respects in which the two persons will retain their individuality goes without saying our Individuality Corollary took care of that. [K1955:92]

Related Glossary Terms Individuality Corollary, Sociality Corollary

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Comprehensive Construct A comprehensive construct is one which subsumes a wide variety of events. [K1955:532]

A permeable construct tends to move in the direction of comprehensiveness because its open-endedness enables it to embrace more and more elements in its context as time goes on. A comprehensive construct is likely to be one which has been in use a long time, although, in certain cases some manics, for example there is a dilation which sometimes appears to bring forth a matrix of comprehensive constructs in a relatively short time. [K1955:477] What do we mean by “variety”? [...] Actually, as we see it, a comprehensive construct is one which cuts across many other construct lines. The "variety" in the elements is established by the person's having otherwise distinguished them as being different from each other by means of other constructs. Thus, when we use the term “variety” we are referring to a “variety” within the person's own construct system. Thus a constellatory construct would tend to be less comprehensive than a propositional construct which embraced precisely the same elements. The constellatory construct tends to fix its elements with respect to other realm memberships and hence they cannot be construed in the same variety as they would otherwise. A wholly preemptive construct could, of course, not be comprehensive at all. [K1955:478] In general, a healthy person's mental processes follow core structures which are comprehensive but not too permeable. Since they are comprehensive, a person can use them to see a wide variety of known events as consistent with his own personality. He can see himself as a complex but organized person. [K1955:482]

Related Glossary Terms Dilation, Incidental Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Comprehensiveness see Comprehensive Construct

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Constellatoriness see Constellatory Construct

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Constellatory Construct A constellatory construct is one which fixes the realm membership of its elements. [K1955:156]

For example, stereotypes: “Anything which is a ball has got to be ...” “Since this is a ball, it must be round, resilient, and small enough to hold in the hand”. [K1955:156-57] It is therefore economical for a person to use constellatory constructs in many daily situations. On the other hand, if a person uses constellatory constructs exclusively it becomes difficult for him to recognize or to experiment with any construct which does not fit neatly into a constellation. [K1955:597]

Related Glossary Terms Preemptive Construct, Propositional Construct, Regnant Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Constriction Constriction occurs when a person narrows his perceptual field in order to minimize apparent incompatibilities. [K1955:532]

When a person moves in the direction of constriction he tends to limit his interests, he deals with one issue at a time, he does not accept potential relationships between widely varying events, he beats out the path of his daily routine in smaller and smaller circles, and he insists that his therapist stick to a sharply delimited version of his problem. [K1955:477] Location of the client's areas of constriction is like observing the eye movements of a person reading a letter; the passages he can read only a word at a time are the ones where he is likely to lose his perspective. When the clinician runs across an area of discourse in which the client must figuratively put his finger on each successive word, he can be sure that he has located an area of constriction. We have said that constriction occurs when a person narrows his perceptual field in order to minimize apparent incompatibility in his construings. It can be seen in the perseveration in brain-injured adults, in the circumstantiality of certain senile persons, and in the legalistic thinking of certain compulsive neurotics. Each of these types of clients, of course, employs constriction in a somewhat different way. [K1955:801] The constriction enables the person to preserve the constructs; but, in doing so, it reduces them to a state of triviality. [K1955:863] Constricting movement, like other forms of movement, may, if one wishes, be viewed as an avoidance of anxiety. That is the negative way to understand it. If one wishes to view constriction positively, he can see it as a way of making one's world manageable by shrinking it to a size he can hold in his own two hands. A person finds that he knows more than he can understand. That is an anxiety-provoking state of affairs. It constitutes a “problem”. He tries to solve his problems by keeping himself ignorant of any further knowledge until his understanding can catch up. He may even try to ignore some of the things he already knows, a neat trick if he can get by with it, but rarely a successful way of avoiding anxiety indefinitely. This is constriction. [K1955:901] As with other diagnostic constructs proposed for use in connection with the psychology of personal constructs, constriction is not necessarily a "bad" thing. There are times when all of us need to constrict our field in order to maintain composure. The psychology of personal constructs itself represents an attempt to deal with an intentionally constricted field the field of human psychology. [...] The point we wish to make is that constriction may sometimes be used to solve problems but that, in doing so, it may let issues accumulate which will eventually threaten a person with insurmountable anxiety. Constriction is one of the axes with respect to which we plot the position and movement of a person's psychological system. [K1955:908]

Related Glossary Terms Dilation, Guilt, Preemptive Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Construct see Personal Construct

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Construction Corollary A person anticipates events by construing their replications. [K1955:50]

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Constructive Alternativism All of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement. [K1955:15]

We take the stand that there are always some alternative constructions available to choose among in dealing with the world. No one needs to paint himself into a corner; no one needs to be completely hemmed in by circumstances; no one needs to be the victim of his biography. [K1955:15] Constructive alternativism falls within that area of epistemology which is sometimes called gnosiology – the “systematic analysis of the conceptions employed by ordinary and scientific thought in interpreting the world, and including an investigation of the art of knowledge, or the nature of knowledge as such.” [K1955:16] Our basic philosophical position, which we have chosen to call “constructive alternativism,” assumes that there are many ways in which the same facts may be construed and that it is therefore impractical to claim that what events naturally are dictates the one and only way in which they may be accurately construed. Rather, we have taken the view that the reality of events permits many alternative and useful constructions to be placed upon them. In deciding just which construction to employ, we need to be guided by what we want to do about the events as well as by their reality. [K1955:774] The psychology of personal constructs and the philosophy of constructive alternativism upon which it is based lead one to view psychotherapy as a reconstruing process. Within these two frameworks we see man not as the victim of his past, only the victim of his construction of it. [...] Our view, then, is that there is nothing in the world which is not subject to some form of reconstruction. This is the hope that constructive alternativism holds out to every man and it is the philosophical basis of the hope that a psychotherapist holds out to his client. [K1955:937-38] The view of constructive alternativism, and hence of our psychology of personal constructs, is that there are many different ways to cut a pie, and the way one selects depends largely on how he expects to eat it. Similarly, there are many different ways to structure the diagnosis of a client, and the way one chooses depends largely upon what he is able to do with the client after he has him all neatly wrapped up in a "diagnosis." [K1955:1190]

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Context The context of a construct comprises those elements among which the user ordinarily discriminates by means of the construct. [K1955:562]

It is somewhat more restricted than the range of convenience, since it refers to the circumstances in which the construct emerges for practical use, and not necessarily to all the circumstances in which a person might eventually use the construct. It is somewhat more extensive than the focus of convenience, since the construct may often appear in circumstances where its application is not optimal. [K1955:562-63] In its minimum context a construct would be a way in which two things are alike and different from a third. [...] The minimum context for a construct is three things. [K1955:111]

Related Glossary Terms Focus of Convenience, Range of Convenience

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Contrast The relationship between the two poles of a construct is one of contrast. [K1955:137]

Related Glossary Terms Personal Construct, Range of Convenience, Similarity

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Contrast End When referring specifically to elements at one pole of a construct, one may use the term “contrast end” to designate the opposite pole. [K1955:563]

Related Glossary Terms Likeness End, Personal Construct, Pole, Submerged Pole

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Control An aspect of the relationship between a superordinate construct and the subordinate constructs which constitute its context. The way the subordinate constructs are subsumed determines the way in which they may operate, just as the way a person construes determines the way in which he behaves. [K1955:926-27]

Constructs are the channels in which one's mental processes run. They are two-way streets along which one may travel to reach conclusions. They make it possible to anticipate the changing tides of events. For the reader who is more comfortable with teleological terms it may be helpful to say that constructs are the controls that one places upon life the life within him as well as the life which is external to him. Forming constructs may be considered as binding sets of events into convenient bundles which are handy for the person who has to lug them. Events, when so bound, tend to become predictable, manageable, and controlled. [...] Let us recall what we said about determinism and free will. We described them as essentially complementary aspects of the same hierarchical structure. That which is subsumed by a construct may be seen as determined by it; that which subsumes the construct is free with respect to it. Now we may approach control as a special case of the aspect of determinism.[K1955:126] From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs, all behavior may be seen as controlled, just as all behavior can be seen as natural and all nature seen as lawful. What makes one person's behavior seem more controlled than another is the way it is subsumed by overriding construction. The “controlled” person performs long-cycle experiments; the impulsive person indulges in short-range experimentation. Both must bow to the outcomes of their experiments sooner or later. Both control their behavior through superordinate construction systems. [K1955:927]

Related Glossary Terms C-P-C Cycle, Impulsivity

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Core Construct A core construct is one which governs the person's maintenance processes [K1955:533] – that is, those by which he maintains his identity and existence [K1955:482].

Core constructs do not necessarily represent dependency [...]. Moreover, role constructs, those which involve one's own behavior in the light of the understanding of other persons' outlooks, do not necessarily represent either core constructs or dependency constructs. They are somewhat more likely to represent the latter, but it is possible to play a role without being appreciably dependent. [K1955:483] When a client expresses physical complaints his core constructs are likely to be involved. But more than that, his communication of his complaint may also imply that dependency is also involved. From his point of view his core structure is ailing and he needs help. [K1955:868] Psychotherapy produces new outlooks; so does graduate education. The difference is this; the new constructs developed in psychotherapy are core constructs – that is, constructs vital to one's personal identity; the new constructs developed in the training program are ordinarily presented and experienced as peripheral constructs – that is, constructs which are utilized more impersonally and objectively. [K1955:1188]

Related Glossary Terms Core Role, Dependency Construct, Maintenance Processes, Peripheral Construct, Role Construct, Threat, Transition

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Core Role A core role involves that part of a person's role structure by which he maintains himself as an integral being. The more peripheral role structures are not included. [K1955:503]

Within one's core structure there are those frames which enable one to predict and control the essential interactions of himself with other persons and with societal groups of persons. Altogether these constitute his conceptualization of his core role. Taken separately they delimit the facets of his core role and explain a person's varicolored reflections under changing social illumination. One's deepest understanding of being maintained as a social being is his concept of his core role. [K1955:502] Basic maintenance is not altogether a self-centered matter. We are dependent for life itself upon an understanding of the thoughts of certain other people. The psychology of personal constructs emphasizes the essential importance of social constructions. It emphasizes the fact that a role is not always a superficial thing, a simple mask to be put on or taken off; rather, that there is a core role, a part one plays as if his life depended upon it. Indeed, his life actually does depend upon it. Finally, it is the loss of status within the core role constructions which is experienced as guilt. [K1955:503] If the whole truth were known, it is likely that we would learn that the sustenance of life in the face of extreme guilt is difficult in any culture group, including our own. It is difficult, not only because it interferes with the adequate distribution of our dependencies, but also because it interferes with the spontaneous elaboration of all our psychological processes, including the so-called "bodily" processes. Our constructions of our roles are not altogether superficial affairs masks to be put on and taken off for the sake of social appearances only. Our constructions of our relationships to the thinking and expectancies of certain other people reach down deeply into our vital processes. Through our constructions of our roles we sustain even the most autonomic life functions. There are indeed core role structures. [K1955:909] Ordinary death is less threatening to people than is the total loss of their core role. [K1955:910]

Related Glossary Terms Core Construct, Guilt, Hostility, Role Construct, Sociality Corollary

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Core Structure see Core Construct

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Counter Dependency Transference The transference of the therapist’s dependencies upon the client.

The therapist who cannot adequately construe his client within a set of professional constructs runs the risk of transferring his own dependencies upon the client. [K1955:671] The failure to rise above commonality strikes all therapists from time to time. By being reasonably alert they can detect the difficulty and take measures to overcome it, perhaps by a restudy of the client's case or by staffing it with other therapists. The counter dependency transference is likely to be inaccessible to the therapist, since it is not easily verbalizable and since he may feel that he does have a subsuming approach to the client. [K1955:672-73]

Related Glossary Terms Dependency Construct, Primary Transference, Transference, Transference Cycle

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Creativity Cycle The Creativity Cycle is one which starts with loosened construction and terminates with tightened and validated construction. [K1955:528]

A person who always uses tight constructions may be productive that is, he may turn out a lot of things tut he cannot be creative; he cannot produce anything which has not already been blueprinted. Creativity always arises out of preposterous thinking. [...] But, just as a person who uses tight constructions exclusively cannot be creative, so a person who uses loose constructions exclusively cannot be creative either. He would never get out of the stage of mumbling to himself. He would never get around to setting up a hypothesis for crucial testing. The creative person must have that important capacity to move from loosening to tightening. Therapy is, for the client as well as for the therapist, a creative process. It involves a series of Creativity Cycles, each of which terminates in some well-planned, but novel, experiment. The therapist tries to help the client release his imagination and then harness it. [K1955:529]

Related Glossary Terms Loose Construct, Tight Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Credulous Approach From a phenomenological point of view, the client – like the proverbial customer – is always right. [K1955:322]

The clinician should maintain a kind of credulous attitude toward whatever the client says. He never discards information given by the client merely because it does not conform to what appear to be the facts! From a phenomenological point of view, the client – like the proverbial customer – is always right. This is to say that his words and bis symbolic behavior possess an intrinsic truth which the clinician should not ignore. But this is not to say that the client always describes events in the way other people would describe them or in the way it is commonly agreed that they did happen. It is not to say that he always describes events in the presence of one person in the way he would describe them in the presence of another. He may use one level of description in talking to the clinician, yet use another level of description in construing events for his own purposes. He may even describe events in a way that is intended to lead the clinician to make false inferences. [K1955:322]

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Dependency see Dependency Construct, Dispersion of Dependency

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Dependency Construct The constructs by which certain persons are construed by the child in relation to his own survival. [K1955:669]

Dependency constructs collect both persons and a particular kind of event under the same rubric. They are not role constructs, as we have defined role; but they do, in a measure, govern interpersonal relations, They are probably put to use by the child long before he is able to do the subsuming which is an essential feature of role construction. Normally they are greatly modified as one develops the acumen and insight into the reactions of others which make role playing possible. They are not easy to verbalize. [...] A child's dependency constructs are relatively impermeable. That is to say, he sees himself as having only one mother who can supply him with food, only one father who can provide shelter, or, at most, only one family upon which he can depend. As he grows older he finds other sources of food and shelter. His dependency constructs tend to become more permeable. He can allow himself to be dependent upon other people too. And he is more and more discriminating in his allocation of dependencies. He depends upon one person for one thing and upon another for another. Furthermore, as the child grows older his dependency constructs tend to be less preemptive. The construct of mother becomes less of a pigeonhole for the person whom he construes as mother. He slowly comes to place her on other dimensions and to allow her degrees of freedom in his construction system. This is a step toward ceasing to see himself as wholly dependent upon a given person and, instead, seeing the dimensional lines of his dependency extending through others. Then he can begin to depend upon various people in appropriately various ways. [K1955:669-70]

Related Glossary Terms Core Construct, Counter Dependency Transference, Dispersion of Dependency, Preemption, Role Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Diagnostic Construct Diagnostic constructs are clinicians’ constructs about clients’ constructs. [K1955:459]

Since we have emphasized the subsuming of personal constructs as the primary basis for role relationships, it can be seen that these diagnostic constructs are designed to help the clinician assume professionally useful role relations with his clients. [K1955:452] It should be kept in mind that the psychodiagnostic constructs which we have proposed are not traits which apply invariably to a given person, but are axes or dimensions with respect to which his construction processes can be plotted from time to time. They are dimensions of intraindividual differences as well as dimensions of interindividual differences. [K1955:514] These constructs define the more important ways in which the client can change, and not merely ways in which the psychologist may distinguish him from other persons. The diagnostic dimensions are avenues of movement as seen by the therapist, just as the clienfs personal constructs are potential avenues of movement as seen by the client. [K1955:775]

Related Glossary Terms Transitive Diagnosis

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Dichotomy Corollary A person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs. [K1955:59]

Related Glossary Terms Personal Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Dilation Dilation occurs when a person broadens his perceptual field in order to reorganize it on a more comprehensive level. It does not, in itself, include the comprehensive reconstruction of those elements. [K1955:532]

When a person moves in the direction of dilation he jumps around more from topic to topic, he lumps his childhood with his future, he sees vast ranges of events as possibly related, he participates in a wider variety of activities, and, if he is a client undergoing psychotherapy, he tends to see everything that happens to him as potentially related to his problem. [K1955:477] While dilation may not actually involve the construing of many elements or a wide variety of elements within the same construct contexts, it is, as we have pointed out, a way to set one's stage for more comprehensive conceptualization. [K1955:477] Dilation is a good thing if one has the construction system to handle it. If the over-all construction system is shaky, there is likely to be a big crash. [K1955:845] Sometimes the clinician may infer anxiety from the client's dilation. If the client, when confronted with invalidating evidence, suddenly dilates, it may be his way of looking for additional elements which, if added to the profusion of elements before him, may somehow provide a key to the situation and enable him to regain structure. To the observer this may seem like distractibility. Yet, from the client's point of view, it is actually a frantic search for structure by finding new elements that is, by dilation. [K1955:899]

Related Glossary Terms Comprehensive Construct, Constriction

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Disorder From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs we may define a disorder as any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation. [K1955:831]

From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs, psychological disorders can be traced to characteristics of a person's construction system. There may be other bases of explanation but this is the one that seems most profitable. If such an explanation will adequately cover the facts, we shall at last have arrived at a vantage point from which the treatment of psychological disorders may be seen as plausible. One can do something about a person's construction system. On the other hand, if we are bound to explain disorders in terms of the past, treatment can be accomplished only by turning the clock back or by tediously canceling out each old experience by overlaying it with a new one. [K1955:832] [A disorder] represents any structure which appears to fail to accomplish its purpose. [K1955:835]

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Dispersion of Dependency Dependency is said undispersed when very few people meet all the child’s (or person’s) needs; it is said dispersed when the person allocates his or her dependencies over a wider range of people, meeting certain needs from some people, and other needs from others.

The child depends for sustenance upon certain people. It may not be particularly meaningful to say that he is more dependent than is an adult. An adult is dependent too, but he extends his dependency discriminatingly to more people, to more things, and to institutions. The child, whose dependency is closely tied up with certain people, is likely to have more constructs which deal with his dependency relations to those particular people. [K1955:461]

Related Glossary Terms Dependency Construct

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Chapter 3 - The Exploration of Personal Construct Systems

Element The things or events which are abstracted by a person’s use of a construct are called elements. In some systems these are called objects. [K1955:562]

Related Glossary Terms Personal Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Emergence see Emergent Pole

Related Glossary Terms Emergent Pole, Implicit Pole

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Emergent Pole The emergent pole of a construct is that which embraces most of the immediately perceived context. [K1955:138]

Related Glossary Terms Emergence, Implicit Pole, Personal Construct, Submerged Pole

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Experience Corollary A person’s construction system varies as he successively construes the replications of events. [K1955:72]

By calling this corollary the Experience Corollary we indicate what we assume to be the essential nature of experience. Experience is made up of the successive construing of events. It is not constituted merely by the succession of events themselves.[K1955:73] The Experience Corollary has profound implications for our thinking about the topic of learning. When we accept the assumption that a person's construction system varies as he successively construes the replications of events, together with the antecedent assumption that the course of all psychological processes is plotted by one's construction of events, we have pretty well bracketed the topic of learning. What has been commonly called 'learning" has been covered at the very outset. Learning is assumed to take place. It has been built into the assumptive structure of the system. The question of whether or not it takes place, or what is learned and what is not learned, is no longer a topic for debate within the system we have proposed. [K1955:75]

Related Glossary Terms Experience Cycle, Validation/Invalidation

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Experience Cycle The unity of experience is a cycle embracing five phases: anticipation, investment, encounter, confirmation or disconfirmation, and constructive revision.

Related Glossary Terms Anticipation, Experience Corollary, Validation/Invalidation

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Fear Fear is the awareness of an imminent incidental change in one's core structures. [K1955:533]

Related Glossary Terms Maintenance Processes, Transition

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Focus of Convenience A constructs focus of convenience comprises those particular things to which the user finds its application maximally useful. These are the elements upon which the construct is likely to have been formed originally. [K1955:562]

Related Glossary Terms Context, Range of Convenience

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Fragmentation Corollary A person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other. [K1955:83]

Related Glossary Terms Modulation Corollary, Permeable Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Fundamental Postulate A person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events. [K1955:46]

Related Glossary Terms Anticipation

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Guilt Guilt is the awareness of dislodgment of the self from one's core role structure. [K1955:533]

Guilt refers to a condition of the person's construction system and not to society's judgment of one's moral culpability. [K1955:489] Finally, it is the loss of status within the core role constructions which is experienced as guilt. [K1955:503] There are many ways in which guilt can enter the picture of a person's life. From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs the point which all of them have in common is this loss of core role structure. We have not found it necessary to invoke the notions of pleasure and pain nor their derivatives, reward and punishment, in defining guilt. We do not see such terms as representing satisfactory explanatory principles. It seems much easier to conceive the variety of ways in which guilt is manifested as all representing loss of core role structure than to try to explain them as reenactments of the punishment scene of a mother teaching her baby bowel control. [K1955:504-05] Guilt is psychological exile from one's core role, regardless of where, when, with whom, or in what scenes the part has been played. [K1955:505] Guilt is not of itself a psychological disorder. It is a form of social disidentification which may represent either exile or emancipation. [K1955:836] If a person could ignore his loss of role by constriction, he might also be able, thereby, to avoid his guilt and its implied paralysis of all the elaborative processes that make life worth living. Some persons do this. [K1955:867] Since guilt, as we have defined it, represents dislodgment from one's core role structure, we could scarcely expect guilt not to be related to “physical” health. Strictly within the psychological realm one might transpose the Biblical saying, “The wages of sin is death,” into “The wages of guilt is death.” It is genuinely difficult to sustain life in the face of guilt. Some people do not even try. [K1955:909] If a person feels guilty for what he has done, and yet considers no alternatives, we can expect him to become hostile. He demands reinstatement of his core role. [K1955:910]

Related Glossary Terms Aggressiveness, Constriction, Core Role, Hostility, Transition

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Hostility Hostility is the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure. [K1955:510]

It is customary to think of hostility as the disposition to do someone harm to hurt him. But in the psychology of personal constructs we seek a way of understanding hostility from the point of view of the person who feels it and what it is that he is actually seeking to accomplish. [K1955:510] Hostility arises when one cannot live with the results of his social experimentation. Hostility involves experiments undertaken with respect to people. Frequently role constructs are put to test, although that is not an essential feature. Moreover, in hostility, the person, instead of revising or anxiously abandoning the construction which has proved to be misleading, takes further active steps to alter the data to fit his hypotheses. If people do not behave the way he predicts, he will make them! That will validate his construction of them! [K1955:512] Psychoanalysis defines guilt in terms of the moral turpitude of accomplishing or seeking to accomplish injury to someone. Personalconstruct psychology leaves the matter of moral turpitude per se to systems other than psychological. Psychoanalysis perceives hostility as a potentially destructive attitude. Personal-construct theory recognizes hostility as a persistent irrealism. [K1955:514] We have defined hostility as being in the social realm. Yet there is a counterpart of hostility which can be directed against things as well as persons. It is interesting and sometimes amusing to see the counterpart of hostility directed against things. A hostile young child may crush a toy in attempting to force it to do what he has anticipated for it. [K1955:880] The tragedy of hostility in the world is not so much that people are hostile, or even that their hostility leads them to destroy those who ignore the incentives they offer, but that there is so much willingness to indulge the hostile person's whims. Such indulgence leads the hostile person down a garden path bordered with flowers of appeasement. At the end of the path there is a wilderness of confused human relations for all. [K1955:881] Our definition of hostility does not coincide with the popular notion of what hostility is. This case in particular is not one which would be popularly labeled as hostile. On the other hand, a skilled and psychoanalytically oriented clinician would be likely to have his attention immediately drawn to the hostile features of the case. He would probably arrive at his diagnosis via the psychoanalytic concept of “reaction formation”. A behavioristically oriented clinician might not use the notion of hostility at all, or he might withhold a diagnosis of hostility until it could be shown that the client was acting destructively toward someone. [K1955:886] If a person feels guilty for what he has done, and yet considers no alternatives, we can expect him to become hostile. He demands reinstatement of his core role. Instead of perceiving the unreasonableness of his own demands he feels that others are making unreasonable demands upon him. He sees other people as behaving or thinking in a hostile manner. [K1955:910]

Related Glossary Terms Aggressiveness, Core Role, Guilt, Transition, Validation/Invalidation

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Impermeability See Permeable Construct

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Implicit Pole The implicit pole of a construct is the one which contrasts with the emergent pole. It is frequently not mentioned by name. Sometimes the person has no symbolization for it; it is symbolized only implicitly by the emergent term. [K1955:138]

Related Glossary Terms Emergence, Emergent Pole, Implicitness, Symbol

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Implicitness see Implicit Pole

Related Glossary Terms Implicit Pole

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Impulsivity Impulsivity is a characteristic foreshortening of the C-P-C Cycle. [K1955:533]

Impulsivity is a form of control, not the absence of control. The field is preempted. A choice point is established. A decision is made. Action ensues. The characteristic feature of impulsivity is that the period of circumspection which normally precedes decision is unduly shortened. The preemption, upon the basis of which the decision is reached, is also likely to be of short duration. It is often followed by another period of circumspection. [K1955:526] Impulsivity is not a trait reserved for certain people only. It is a dimension of behavior. All people behave with a measure of impulsivity. A person is more impulsive over one span of time than over another. A person is likely to be more impulsive about some matters than about others. [K1955:527] A person caught in an anxiety situation may construe impulsively in order to bring some semblance of structure to bear upon his problems. The impulsivity is a quick attempt at solution. A person caught in a guilt situation may act impulsively to restore his role. He may return unexpectedly to his old group identifications. The social-drinking alcoholic is likely to exhibit this impulsive restoration of his group identifications. [K1955:527]

Related Glossary Terms C-P-C Cycle, Circumspection, Control

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Incidental Construct An incidental construct is one which subsumes a narrow variety of events. [K1955:532]

Related Glossary Terms Comprehensive Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Individuality Corollary Persons differ from each other in their construction of events. [K1955:55]

Related Glossary Terms Commonality Corollary

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Level of Cognitive Awareness The level of cognitive awareness ranges from high to low. A high-level construct is one which is readily expressed in socially effective symbols; whose alternatives are both readily accessible; which falls well within the range of convenience of the client's major constructions; and which is not suspended by its superordinating constructs. [K1955:532]

The therapist may even deal with the client's experience at a higher level of cognitive awareness than the client does. But does this mean that the therapist is closer to the truth, or to reality, or to understanding than the client is? Perhaps not. The client is himself a bit of truth, a bit of reality, and a part of the very substance of understanding. Is the therapist closer to the client than the client is to himself? We think not. But the therapist's psychological training, if he has any, should enable him to make certain predictions about the client which the client cannot make about himself. He does this, not because he is a better master of the client's construction system than the client is himself, but because he is able to subsume the client's construction system and construe it along with other features of reality which the client does not understand so well. [K1955:1020]

Related Glossary Terms Preverbal Construct, Range of Convenience, Submergence, Subordinate Construct, Superordinate Construct, Suspension

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Likeness End When referring specifically to elements at one pole of a construct, one may use the term likeness end, meaning that we are referring to the pole at which these elements are grouped by the construction. [K1955:137]

Related Glossary Terms Contrast End, Pole, Submerged Pole

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Loose Construct Loose constructs are those which lead to varying predictions but which, for practical purposes, may be said to retain their identity. [K1955:484]

Among other things, loose construction is exemplified by dreams. The loose construction is like a rough sketch which may be preliminary to a carefully drafted design. The sketch permits flexible interpretation. This or that feature is not precisely placed. The design is somewhat ambiguous. [K1955:484] People protect themselves against anxiety in various ways. One way is in a loosening of one's constructs. [K1955:497] The psychoanalytic therapeutic procedure lays great stress on loosening. In emphasizing loosening the analysts believe that they are plumbing the depths of the client's personality. [...] The psychology of personal constructs sees the new constructs which arise out of loosened construction, not as the "true thoughts" or "insights" of the person, but as new hypotheses which must still be tightened up and tested before they are to be accepted as useful. [K1955:530] By loosening his constructions the person makes a kind of rubber-sheet templet to his experiences. His constructions can now be stretched to fit almost any kind of validational evidence. No matter if he does appear to miss his predictions; he can always take the stand, “That is practically what I said.” Thus he escapes, for the time being at least, the chaos of anxiety. [K1955:854] Of course, one loose construction is only approximately the same as another for it is only approximately the same as itself from time to time. The communication between two persons who both employ the similar loose construction will not be as precise as will the communication between two persons who employ similar tight construction. Yet each loose thinker Is tolerant of the other's ambiguity because it is approximate to his own. Neither needs to be made anxious by the other. Neither needs to avoid the other in order to maintain his poise. In such a case, then, loose conceptualization does not lead inevitably to withdrawal. ]K1955:857-58]

Related Glossary Terms Creativity Cycle, Loosening, Tight Construct, Tightening

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Loosening The process leading from a tight to a looser construct.

Related Glossary Terms Loose Construct, Tight Construct, Tightening

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Maintenance Processes The processes which are related to the person’s identity and existence and which are outside the range of convenience of personal construct theory as a psychological theory.

Related Glossary Terms Core Construct, Fear, Threat

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Modulation Corollary The variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the construct within whose range of convenience the variants lie. [K1955:77]

Our Modulation Corollary states that the variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose ranges of convenience the variants lie. This is a matter of taking events in one's stride, If he tries to deal with his world by legalistic bookkeeping, he is likely to find that there is little he can do to adapt himself to varying events. A person who approaches his world with a repertory of impermeable constructs is likely to find his system unworkable through the wider expanses of events. He will, therefore, tend to constrict his experience to the narrower ranges which he is prepared to understand. [K1955:172]

Related Glossary Terms Fragmentation Corollary, Permeable Construct, Range of Convenience

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Organization Corollary Each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs. [K1955:56]

Related Glossary Terms Subordinate Construct, Superordinate Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Peripheral Construct A peripheral construct is one which can be altered without serious modification of the core structure. [K1955:533]

Related Glossary Terms Core Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Permeability see Permeable Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Permeable Construct A construct is permeable if it will admit to its range of convenience new elements which are not yet construed within its framework. [K1955:79]

An utterly concrete construct, if there were such a tiling, would not be permeable at all, for it would be made up of certain specified elements – those and no others. Such a construct would have to be impermeable. There are, of course, relative degrees of permeability and impermeability. [K1955:79] In earlier formulations of the theory of personal constructs we used the term “stable aspects” instead of “permeability”. Permeable constructs, because they possess resiliency under the impact of new experience, do tend to be stable, but “permeability” is a more precise and operationally useful mark of identification for the kinds of constructs we have in mind than is “stability.” [K1955:80] Permeability is an indication of the availability of a construct for meeting varied situations in life. It is not a measure of a construct's effectiveness except in this one respect. [K1955:234] During the course of psychotherapy the clinician is always interested in the development of impermeability in certain constructs which have caused difficulty for the client. It is as if the client were closing out his file. When he says “I was” instead of “I am” some clinicians consider the change a possible healthy development of impermeability, with respect to the construct involved. Impermeable constructs are partly unavailable to the client and, as far as adjusting his role to new people is concerned, inactive. [K1955:234] This failure of the construct system to embrace urgent events may accompany one's use of incompatible subsystems of construction. Most of us can tolerate some amount of incompatibility. Our Fragmentation Corollary assumes that one may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other. The Modulation Corollary, as we keep reminding the reader, assumes that the variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose ranges of convenience the variants lie. Taken together, these two corollaries assume that one can tolerate some incompatibility, but not too much. The amount that can be tolerated depends upon the permeability of the superordinating constructs. If those constructs which would normally superordinate the variants are insufficiently permeable to admit the impending variants into their ranges of convenience, the person finds himself in an anxiety situation. His construction system fails him. [K1955:496]

Related Glossary Terms Fragmentation Corollary, Modulation Corollary

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Personal Construct An aspect by which at least two elements are construed as similar and, for the same aspect, different from at least a third one.

[Constructs] are ways of construing the world. They are what enables man, and lower animals too, to chart a course of behavior, explicitly formulated or implicitly acted out, verbally expressed or utterly inarticulate, consistent with other courses of behavior or inconsistent with them, intellectually reasoned or vegetatively sensed. [K1955:9] A way in which some things are construed as being alike and yet different from others. [K1955:74]

Related Glossary Terms Contrast, Contrast End, Dichotomy Corollary, Element, Emergent Pole, Pole, Submerged Pole

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Pole Each construct discriminates between two poles, one at each end of its dichotomy. The elements abstracted are like each other at each pole with respect to the construct and are unlike the elements at the other pole. [K1955:563]

Related Glossary Terms Contrast End, Likeness End, Personal Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Preemption see Preemptive Construct

Related Glossary Terms C-P-C Cycle, Dependency Construct

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Preemptive Construct A preemptive construct is one which preempts its elements for membership in its own realm exclusively. [K1955:156]

The species type of construct belongs to this category. It can be exemplified by the statement, “Anything which is a ball can be nothing but a ball.” In this case the construct is ball, and all the things which are balls are excluded from the realms of other constructs; they cannot be “spheres,” “pellets,” “shots,” or anything but balls. This is a pigeonhole type of construct; what has been put into this pigeonhole cannot simultaneously be put into any other. [K1955:153-54] Preemptive thinking, in a moment of decision, is essential if one is to take an active part in his universe. But preemptive thinking which never resolves itself into prepositional thinking condemns the person to a state of intellectual rigor mortis. [K1955:156] Preemptive or partly preemptive constructs have a stultifying effect upon diagnosis. Take, for example, the notion, growing partly out of Kraepelinian thinking, that a person who is a psychotic cannot also be neurotic. This is a somewhat preemptive construction. It is the same kind of reasoning which leads some people to say that what is “physiological” cannot be “psychological,” or that a given case “belongs to” the physician rather than to the psychologist or to the teacher. This kind of pigeonhole reasoning prevents the formulation of new classes of hypotheses and the scientific testing of those hypotheses. It precludes prepositional treatment of phenomena. [K1955:456]

Related Glossary Terms Constellatory Construct, Constriction, Primary Transference, Propositional Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Preverbal Construct A preverbal construct is one which continues to be used, even though it has no consistent word symbols. It may or may not have been devised before the person had command of speech. [K1955:532]

In dealing with a preverbal construct it is important to realize that, ordinarily, it is one which was originally designed to construe those elements of which an infant could be aware. One should therefore not expect his adult client to describe or portray a preverbal construct in a manner which is becoming to a mature person. The therapist has before him an infant who is speaking with the voice of an adult. The infant's thinking may be overlaid with the sophistication of adulthood; but as the overlay is thrown back, the wide-eyed, vaguely comprehending, dereistic child is revealed. [K1955:461] [...] preverbal constructs, when revealed in an adult client, are often found to relate to the client's dependency, though that need not always be so. [K1955:461] Preverbal constructs may, in some instances, represent a kind of core of the client's construction system. They are likely to deal with the self as well as with other people and inanimate things. The therapist should therefore not be surprised to find a client using a preverbal type of construction to maintain his integrity and unique identity in the face of difficulties. Preverbal constructs are often found in the client's reserve lines of self-defense. [K1955:461-62] The preverbal construct may have an overlay of verbalized constructs which may mislead the clinician. The client may appear to be highly articulate. There may be a torrent of words. The vocabulary may be versatile, picturesque, and, in many respects, unusually apt. [...] This is likely to be a case in which certain important preverbal constructions are operating in a permeable fashion. [...] Usually the preverbalized constructions which are covered with the overlay of verbalized constructs relate to the client's dependencies. [K1955:462] [...] some persons utilize their preverbal constructs in such a permeable way that many of the elements of adult life are added to the contexts of these infantile constructs. [K1955:463] There are four kinds of clinical evidence which one may use in determining whether or not he is dealing with essentially preverbal constructions: (1) the client's efforts at verbalization repeatedly end up in an expression of confusion; (2) inability to verbalize the construct consistently but relatively better ability to illustrate the construct by producing the elements which make up its context; (3) appearance in dreams, the content of which the client claims he cannot remember but which, on questioning, appear to have some structure in terms of mood, number of people, movement, and so on; (4) "recollections" of events which the client is not sure really happened. [K1955:465] In part, the notion of preverbal constructs is a substitute construct for dealing with some of the elements which are otherwise structured by means of the construct of the “unconscious.” The construct of preverbal constructs has a better range of convenience, including, as it does, personal constructs which are communicable by means other than words, and including personal constructs which are only partly immobilized because of their poor symbolization. [K1955:466]

Related Glossary Terms Level of Cognitive Awareness, Symbol

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Preverbalism see Preverbal Construct

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Primary Transference The client construes the therapist preemptively. [K1955:674]

The therapist becomes “typed” in his part. No longer can he cast himself in a variety of supporting roles. The play must always be written and enacted to fit his identity. Therapeutic movement may appear to take place within the therapy room, but no really new approaches appear to be tried outside of the therapy room. What the client learns he generalizes to other behaviors of the therapist but not to other people. [K1955:675] Frequently it is possible to detect the forming of primary transference by the client's seeking to invoke the therapist's counter dependency transferences. [K1955:677]

Related Glossary Terms Counter Dependency Transference, Preemptive Construct, Secondary Transference, Transference

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Professional Construct see Diagnostic Construct

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Propositional Construct A propositional construct is one which leaves its elements open to construction in all other respects. [K1955:155]

In the case of the ball example the following illustrates a prepositional construct: “Any roundish mass may be considered, among other things, as a ball.” [...] The propositional construct [...] represents one end of a continuum, the other end of which is represented by the preemptive and constellatory constructs.[K1955:155] A construct which carries no implications regarding the other realm memberships of its elements is a propositional construct. This is uncontaminated construction. [K1955:564]

Related Glossary Terms C-P-C Cycle, Circumspection, Constellatory Construct, Preemptive Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Propositionality see Propositional Construct

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Range Corollary A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only. [K1955:68]

Related Glossary Terms Anticipation

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Range of Convenience A construct’s range of convenience comprises all those things to which the user finds its application useful.

The theory's range of convenience is what determines the boundaries of the discipline. A range of convenience is that expanse of the real world over which a given system or theory provides useful coverage. Those features of the universe which do not fit neatly into the system are left out of the psychological realm for the time being. [K1955:17] The construct denotes an aspect of the elements lying within its range of convenience, on the basis of which some of the elements are similar to others and some are in contrast. [K1955:61] We see relevant similarity and contrast as essential and complementary features of the same construct and both of them as existing within the range of convenience of the construct. That which is outside the range of convenience of the construct is not considered part of the contrasting field but simply an area of irrelevancy. [K1955:69]

Related Glossary Terms Context, Contrast, Focus of Convenience, Level of Cognitive Awareness, Modulation Corollary, Similarity

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Regnancy See Regnant Construct

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Regnant Construct A regnant construct is a kind of superordinate construct which assigns each of its elements to a category on an allor-none basis. [K1955:480]

This is the kind of grouping one finds in classical logic. For example, the construct of implement would be regnant over the construct of spade if one were to say that all spades were implements. The construction of spade is so regulated by the construction of implement that if one says, “This is a spade,” he has also implied that this is an implement. Calling something a “spade” commits it to another classification too. [K1955:480-81] A regnant construct has the effect of making its subordinate constructs constellatory. If all spades are implements, then the realm membership with respect to implement is fixed. The moment one applies the construct of spade to an object, he has implied that it is an implement. [K1955:481] A superordinate construct is not a regnant construct if it commits a subordinate element construct only to its range of convenience and does not invariably class the subordinate construct as one of the like elements or as one of the unlike elements. [K1955:481]

Related Glossary Terms Constellatory Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Role Construct A role construct is a construct which has as elements the construction processes of other people.

Role constructs are [...] constructs which have other persons as elements in their contexts. More particularly, they are constructs which have the presumed constructs of other persons as elements in their contexts. [K1955:209] Core constructs do not necessarily represent dependency, as we have defined dependency in a previous chapter. Moreover, role constructs, those which involve one's own behavior in the light of the understanding of other persons' outlooks, do not necessarily represent either core constructs or dependency constructs. They are somewhat more likely to represent the latter, but it is possible to play a role without being appreciably dependent. [K1955:483]

Related Glossary Terms Core Construct, Core Role, Dependency Construct, Sociality Corollary, Transference, Transference Cycle

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Secondary Transference The client applies to the therapist a varying sequence of constructs from the figures of his past.

The therapist is himself merely incidental to the client's perceptions, and the constructions placed upon him by the client are lifted directly from former experiences. The therapist, or a part of his behavior, is collected as another element in the context of each construct. [K1955:674]

Related Glossary Terms Primary Transference, Transference

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Similarity The relationship between the elements under the same pole.

In construing, the person notes features in a series of elements which characterize some of the elements and are particularly uncharacteristic of others. Thus he erects constructs of similarity and contrast. Both the similarity and the contrast are inherent in the same construct, A construct which implied similarity without contrast would represent just as much of a chaotic undifferentiated homogeneity as a construct which implied contrast without similarity would represent a chaotic particularized heterogeneity. The former would leave the person engulfed in a sea with no landmarks to relieve the monotony; the latter would confront him with an interminable series of kaleidoscopic changes in which nothing would ever appear familiar. [K1955:50-51] We see the construct as composed essentially of a similarity-contrast dimension which he strikes through a part of his field of experience. We need to look at both ends of it if we want to know what it means to him. We cannot understand him well if we look only at the similarity “respect” end of the dimension. We cannot understand what he means by “respect” unless we know what he sees as relevantly opposed to “respect.” [K1955:71]

Related Glossary Terms Contrast, Range of Convenience

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Sociality Corollary To the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person. [K1955:95]

In order to play a role in an ongoing social process – and therapy is such a process – one must, in the language of our Sociality Corollary, have a subsuming construction of those with whom he is conjoined in that process. Commonality is not enough. Commonality, as defined by the Commonality Corollary, is no more than a basis for people's duplicating each other's psychological processes. [K1955:672]

Related Glossary Terms Commonality Corollary, Core Role, Role Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Submerged Pole The submerged pole of a construct is the one which is less available for application to events. [K1955:532]

A construct is a two-ended thing. There is the likeness and there is the contrast end. Sometimes one of these two ends is less available than the other. When this is markedly true we may refer to the less available end as the submerged end. [K1955:467] Ordinarily it is the contrast end of the construct which is submerged. In some cases it is the likeness end. Since constructs are usually symbolized by some element which is associated with the likeness end, it becomes somewhat more difficult to uncover the submerged likeness end of a construct. [K1955:469]

Related Glossary Terms Contrast End, Emergent Pole, Likeness End, Personal Construct

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Submergence see Submerged Pole

Related Glossary Terms Level of Cognitive Awareness

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Subordinate Construct A subordinate construct is one which is included as an element in the context of another. [K1955:532]

A subordinate construct is an element in the context of a superordinate construct. It is one of the things with which the superordinate construct is concerned. The fact that it is subordinate tells us this and this only. We do not know,, until we take a look at the superordinate construct itself, how the subordinate construct will be grouped, whether all on the "like" side, all on the "unlike" side, or divided. A construct’s subordination carries no constellatory or nonpropositionality implications. It is committed only to the range of convenience of the superordinate construct. [K1955:480]

Related Glossary Terms Level of Cognitive Awareness, Organization Corollary, Superordinate Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Superordinate Construct A superordinate construct is one which includes another as one of the elements in its context. [K1955:532]

A person's construction system is composed of complementary superordinate and subordinate relationships. The subordinate systems are determined by the superordinate systems into whose jurisdiction they are placed. The superordinate systems, in turn, are free to invoke new arrangements among the systems which are subordinate to them. [...] In his role identifying him with his superordinating system, the person is free with respect to subordinate changes he attempts to make. In his role as the follower of his own fundamental principles, he finds his life determined by them.[K1955:78] Constructs are not to be confounded with the factual material of which they are personalized versions; they are interpretations of those facts. But constructs may be used as viewpoints for seeing other constructs, as in the hierarchical relationships of constructs within a system. In that sense the superordinate constructs are versions of those constructs which are subordinate to them. This makes the subordinate constructs a form of reality which is construed through the use of the superordinate constructs. [K1955:136]

Related Glossary Terms Level of Cognitive Awareness, Organization Corollary, Subordinate Construct

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Suspension A suspended element is one which is omitted from the context of a construct as the result of revision of the person's construct system. [K1955:532]

The phenomena which are popularly identified as "forgetting," "dissociation," and "repression" can all be handled within the theoretical framework of the psychology of personal constructs in much the same way. In order for an experience to be remembered or perceived clearly it must be supported within a system of constructs. When one construct is resolved in favor of another one, some of the elements tend to drop out, especially those which do not fit so well into the new construct. Simultaneously, other elements which were once less available to the person are now more prominently displayed because the new structure provides a convenient peg to hang them on. When one structure is substituted for another, the range of convenience of the new one is not likely to coincide precisely with that of the other. The new range of convenience can almost always be expected to allow some elements to drop out and others to reappear. [K1955:471] When a structure is rejected, because at the moment it is incompatible with the over-all system which the person is using, we may say that it has undergone suspension. [K1955:472] Suspended structures are not necessarily impermeable during the period of their suspension. New experiences may be incorporated within the suspended structure even though the structure may still remain largely unavailable to elaboration and modification. A suspended structure is not easily tested and hence not easily invalidated or reconstrued within a larger structure. [K1955:474-75]

Related Glossary Terms Level of Cognitive Awareness

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Symbol The word introduced into the context of a construct and which gives the construct its name.

A person is not necessarily articulate about the constructions he places upon his world. Some of his constructions are not symbolized by words; he can express them only in pantomime. Even the elements which are construed may have no verbal handles by which they can be manipulated and the person finds himself responding to them with speechless impulse. Thus, in studying the psychology of man-thephilosopher, we must take into account his subverbal patterns of representation and construction. [K1955:16] Construing is not to be confounded with verbal formulation. A person's behavior may be based upon many interlocking equivalencedifference patterns which are never communicated in symbolic speech. Many of these preverbal or nonverbal governing constructs are embraced in the realm of physiology. [K1955:51] By construction of experience we do not necessarily refer to highly verbalized interpretations. We keep reiterating this point. A person may construe his experience with little recourse to words, as, for example, in certain conditioned reflexes. Even those constructions which are symbolized by words are not necessarily similar just because the words are similar. Conversely, two persons may be using essentially the same constructions of their experience, although they express themselves in quite different terms. [K1955:92] It is not possible for one to express the whole of his construction system. Many of one's constructs have no symbols to be used as convenient word handles. They are therefore difficult, not only for others to grasp and subsume within their own systems, but also difficult for the person himself to manipulate or to subsume within the verbally labeled parts of his system. The fact that they do not readily lend themselves to organization within the verbally labeled parts of the system makes it difficult for a person to be very articulate about how he feels, or for him to predict what he will do in a future situation which, as yet, exists only in terms of verbal descriptions. [K1955:110] Symbolism is a handy tool. [...] it is not the sole tool for shaping thought but is certainly a very useful and commonly used one. Man has developed a neat trick in the use of symbolism. He makes up sounds and shapes and introduces them artificially into the context of his constructs as one of the elements. Then he lets this sound or shape become a symbol of the construct. [K1955:138]

Related Glossary Terms Implicit Pole, Preverbal Construct

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Chapter 2 - Basic Theory

Symbolism See Symbol

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Threat Threat is the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one's core structures. [K1955:489]

Basically, threat is a characteristic of a constructs relation to the superordinate constructs in a system. A construct is threatening when it is itself an element in a next-higher-order construct which is, in turn, incompatible with other higher-order constructs upon which the person is dependent for his living. The construct of danger is a threat when it becomes an element in the context of death or injury. There are circumstances when it is not a threat, at least not a very significant one. A rollercoaster elicits a construct of danger, but that danger is rarely placed in the context of death. [K1955:166] In order for the threat to be significant, the prospective change must be substantial. Death is an example. Death is threatening to most people. We describe it as threatening to them because they perceive it both as likely to happen to them and as likely to bring about drastic changes in their core constructs. Death is not so threatening when it does not seem so imminent. It is not so threatening to those who see either their souls or the fundamental meaning of their lives as being unaffected by it. In such persons the core structures are not so likely to be affected by the prospect of death. The prospective change must appear to be comprehensive. This means that the threat represents a multifaceted alternative core structure. One is threatened when that which he thought all along might happen to his core structure at last looks as if it was about to arrive. A prisoner of twenty years, while eager, is nevertheless threatened on the last day by the imminence of his release. Most persons are threatened by the likelihood of their showing infantile behavior in certain situations. A new client about to undergo therapy is threatened by the prospect that he may really change his outlook. [K1955:489-90]

Related Glossary Terms Core Construct, Maintenance Processes, Transition

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Tight Construct A tight construct is one which leads to unvarying predictions. [K1955:533]

Consider the person who faces the changing scene of life with nothing but tight constructions. Every prediction, every anticipation, must be precise and exact Every element which he construes must fit the context of its construct without any possibility of being questioned. There are no loose fits which might let anxiety seep in. The whole structure is designed to be anxiety-tight. [K1955:849] The person who casts his prediction in the form of a tight construct has the chance of getting a clear-cut yes or no answer. The loosethinking person blinks his eyes and mumbles, “What happened?” [K1955:1064]

Related Glossary Terms Creativity Cycle, Loose Construct, Loosening, Tightening

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Chapter 2 - Diagnostic Constructs

Tightening The process leading from a loose to a tighter construct.

Related Glossary Terms Loose Construct, Loosening, Tight Construct

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Transference The tendency of any person to perceive another prejudicately as a replicate of a third person. In this sense, “transference” is not necessarily pathological, nor is the prejudgment necessarily antipathetic. The client in therapy may transfer various perceptions upon his therapist. [K1955:1100]

All interpersonal relations are based essentially on transference relations, though they are subject to validation and revision. [K1955:145] Transference [is] a special case of experimentation with role constructs. [K1955:163] Transference, as the term is reserved for use in psychotherapy, is based upon role constructs rather than constructs in general. It has to do with one's perceptions of persons who perform parts in cooperative social enterprises. It refers to the way one attempts to subsume the constructs of others. In psychotherapy it represents the client's bid to subsume parts of the construct system of the therapist and thence to play in a role relationship with him. Unless the client makes an effort to construe the therapist by transferring role constructs upon him, the therapist is scarcely able to exemplify any aspect of reality in the hope of having it meaningfully interpreted. [K1955:664]

Related Glossary Terms Counter Dependency Transference, Primary Transference, Role Construct, Secondary Transference, Transference Cycle

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Transference Cycle The client's use of constructions which are transferred upon the therapist appears to go in cycles. [K1955:681]

During a given cycle of transference it appears that the client elaborates, examines, and tests certain role constructs. He makes use of the therapist – may even be quite dependent upon him for a time. Yet upon the completion of each major reconstruction of a construct area the transferences made upon the therapist appear to become superficial again. Dependencies appear to be reduced as far as the therapist is concerned. [K1955:681]

Related Glossary Terms Counter Dependency Transference, Role Construct, Transference

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Transition Transitions are changes, or the prospect of changes in one’s construction system, construed by the therapist by means of diagnostic constructs.

When a person finds his personal construction failing him, he suffers anxiety. When he faces an impending upheaval in his core structure, he experiences threat. A person who construes the construction system of another person sets the stage for playing a role in relation to that person. When he finds himself dislodged from his role, he experiences guilt. This has much to do with social organization. Aggression is merely the active pursuit of constructive experience, but it may be threatening to one's associates. Hostility, while not necessarily violent, is the continued attempt to extort validational evidence in support of a personal construction which has already discredited itself. [K1955:560-61]

Related Glossary Terms Aggressiveness, Anxiety, Core Construct, Fear, Guilt, Hostility, Threat

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Transitive Diagnosis Transitive diagnosis is [...] based on a dimensional system of axes and transitional states. [K1955:775]

The term transitive diagnosis [...] suggests that we are concerned with transitions in the client’s life, that we are looking for bridges between the client’s present and his future. Moreover, we expect to take an active part in helping the client select or build the bridges to be used and in helping him cross them safely. The client does not ordinarily sit cooped up in a nosological pigeonhole; he proceeds along his way. If the psychologist expects to help him he must get up off his chair and start moving along with him. [K1955:775]

Related Glossary Terms Diagnostic Construct

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Validation/Invalidation The result of the verification of an anticipation.

A person commits himself to anticipating a particular event If it takes place, his anticipation is validated. If it fails to take place, his anticipation is invalidated. Validation represents the compatibility (subjectively construed) between one's prediction and the outcome he observes. Invalidation represents incompatibility (subjectively construed) between one's prediction and the outcome he observes. [K1955:158] If a person makes only vague commitments to the future he receives only vague validational experience. If his commitments are incidental and fragmentary, he experiences fragmentary validation only. If his commitments are based on far-reaching interpretations of the situation, he may construe the outcome as having sweeping significance. [K1955:160]

Related Glossary Terms Anticipation, Experience Corollary, Experience Cycle, Hostility

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